I completely agree Heidi. Why, after several days ago he purported to apologise, is Keith still posting this derogatory feminisation stuff?
Professor Thea Blackler
Discipline Leader for Industrial, Interaction, Visual Communication and Fashion Design
Queensland University of Technology
2 George Street Brisbane QLD 4001
Australia
Phone: +61 7 3138 7030
Mobile: +61 410 736494
Web: https://research.qut.edu.au/designlab/
Eprints: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Blackler,_Alethea.html
Orcid: orcid.org/0000-0002-9406-2645
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Heidi Overhill
Sent: Thursday, 14 February 2019 10:28 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: On the History of the List
How are you not ashamed of yourself? This is genuinely disgusting.
On Wednesday, February 13, 2019, 7:19:31 p.m. EST, Keith Russell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Dear Nigel,
It’s not the attempt to ground Design Research, as such, that leads to the feminization of universities. The attempt to formalise a process which is intrinsically amorphous will always lead to feminising outcomes. The Idiot’s Guide to Life would be one such feminizing project if it were conducted non-ironically.
The Socratic Method is not a feminizing method. Socrates spends much of his time requiring his listeners to explicate the forms of meaning behind their assertions of specific knowledge (what is truth, for example). When they get tangled up, Socrates is illustrating the failure of the students to show mastery of their own discourse. If you attend to Plato’s later, so-called critical dialogues, in particular Parmenides and Theaetetus, you will for once, witness a truly masterful account of knowledge. So, yes, you can become wise to the shapeless shape of masculine inquiry.
The Sophistic Method, learning how to make the weaker argument the stronger, so one might beat opponents, in political stoushes, is a feminine process. You learn distinct things so you can muck with your opponent.
Playing the victim is a case in point with currency. How to defeat an assertive man? Pretend you are a wounded female child. Show him cute wet childish eyes and he will fall apart. Do this is court and the man will go to jail for life.
If we use the binary set that Jordan Peterson uses, then we can separate these two approaches according to the masculine principle of order
(Apollo?) and the feminine principle of chaos (Dionysus?). But wait. Surely this in an inversion of the model I have just espoused? The Sophists are offering a formal rhetorical structure (order) while Socrates is offering the ill-defined, chaotic and amorphous confusion of endless questioning (ever more chaos)?
Ah ha. The tricks, the tricks. We need to look more closely. The shapeless shape of knowledge, won out of chaos, but never made fully explicit, is the Dionysian masculine principle (Right Brain). The formalised and rational account of the world is but chaos covered over by resolved but inadequate knowledge (Left Brain). It is feminised Apollonian chaos. As such, it is very useful but always in need of radical questioning. Do my presumptions explain or cover over what still needs explaining?
Do we need and use both approaches? Of course we do. Do we need more of the Dionysian at this present moment in history? My answer is obviously, yes.
Do we need to be less confident of our feminised Apollonian givens? My answer is obviously, yes.
University learning, for me, presumes a command of the feminine Apollonian knowledge available in the culture. Beyond that presumption, university learning requires an active engagement with the masculine process of deriving order out of chaos. Universities are, in essence, masculine institutions.
(This extended account of Order and Chaos is not offered by Peterson – I am merely using his binary set as a culturally available set for my own purposes. He might or he might not agree that my distinctions are useful to his arguments about order and chaos. I wouldn’t know.)
Two thirds of my university teaching (20 years out of 30) took place in the area of Communication Studies. Attempts in this area to ground their community of concern with the status of a Discipline, with the certification of a distinctive “way of thinking about things”
(Communication Thinking?) and with a formalised individual Research Methodology, have also failed.
This same kind of failure has also taken place in areas such as Cultural Studies, Womens Studies, and Gender Studies. The root causes of these failures are the same. I do not treat these failures as trivial, but I do consider that they were inevitable.
Just as an aside, it is quite comical that Communication Studies has mostly spent its intellectual wealth in proving it is not Cultural Studies. The secret aim was always to piggyback on Cultural Studies which might have seemed to have secured its status as a discipline simply by virtue of attracting lots of students. There must be a discipline here somewhere because we earn buckets and buckets of money. So, if Cultural Studies has won the day and got triple gold (actual discipline, individual ways of thinking, distinct and original research methods) then Communication Studies, which is a direct off spring, must also now be ok. Make me a chair, crown me princeling.
So, yes, I have laboured in fields of concern that I presumed were always doomed to fail in their larger and grand projects of institutional ratification and elevation and just acceptance. In my labour I did not set out to bring things down, to subvert the endeavours of others. Indeed, much of my research in Design has been offered as a way of clarifying issues. I have had minimal success in raising the intellectual expectations of the field. Mostly I have been marginalised and tolerated as a funny fellow.
What are the root causes of the failure of these fields of concern?
keith
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 4:19 AM Nigel Cross <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> So, after 20 years of assisting researchers and research students in
> the discussion of 'PhD studies and related research in design', what
> might be some conclusions on the current state of the art?
> According to Keith Russell, the whole "project" of building an
> academic discipline in design has failed, and it may even have
> contributed to the (pernicious, destructive) "feminisation" of universities.
> According to Terry Love, the "God-awful standard" of PhDs in "Art and
> Design" (whatever that might be) still persists, because those PhDs
> simply don't match up to the more holy standard of PhDs in Engineering
> Design (which is the type that Terry has).
> I'm puzzled by the negativity of their assessments, but I'm not really
> qualified to comment any further here, because, as Terry pointed out
> to me recently, I have contributed only 33 posts to the list, whereas
> the "active members" have each contributed "more than 50 times that".
> To have made more than 1650 posts each over 20 years, I think he must
> be referring to the small number of such contributors who have so
> consistently assisted the discussion and therefore have been so
> influential in achieving the current state of the art as Keith and Terry perceive it.
>
> Nigel Cross
> Emeritus Professor of Design Studies, The Open University, UK.
>
>
>
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