Thank you Tiphaine for your message. You are entirely right and this has been an issue on the list for some time as you mention. And it is not just the few or just those messages that can be classified as bullying. The other day we had a message about identity as a designer from Gonçalo throughout which the examples (a designer and then a musician) were referred to as "he". The argument that this somehow includes everyone and can really mean any gender is outdated and list posters need to make the effort to use inclusive language.
So I would like to back Tiphaine up and say yes please do your homework and think carefully about the language and ideas you use.
Thanks
Professor Thea Blackler
Discipline Leader for Experiential Design
(incorporating Industrial, Interaction, Visual Communication and Fashion Design)
School of 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: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Blackler,_Thea.html
Orcid: orcid.org/0000-0002-9406-2645
On Wednesday, July 15, 2020, 04:21:31 a.m. EDT, KAZI-TANI Tiphaine <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Dear Don, dear all,
I'm part of the list's hoi polloi, the silent many.
I'm also queer, assigned female at birth, non-anglophone, not tenured and working in a B-list design school. I'm white, valid, with a neuro-typical passing.
While most of the posts on the list are informational and cordial, I'm unfortunately often disappointed by the barely perceptible signs of condescendence if not symbolic violence typical of the "canonical" organisation of academia. Academia should be here understood as one of the numerous avatars of our democratic institutions that are still infused with hierarchical differentialism of all kinds (racism, sexism, classism, agism, validism, etc.). That's the reason why I introduced my situation : I'm well aware that my individual and collective subjectivity makes me a minor voice as well as a prized token in certain circumstances. A prized token when academia needs people like me as a badge of good will towards "inclusivity" and "openness", a minor voice, mostly unheard if not roughly kept silent, when wanting to question the obvious difference of privileges that regularly expresses itself here — like many of you, I've seen peers being bullied because they were reclaiming their decolonial and feminist positions, I've seen peers refusing to check their privileges, for the sake of science (?), as if Haraway and Harding's works on the situatedness of research and researchers had never existed.
So, I'm sorry to say that, no, to me, it's not just a dozen of trolls regularly bullying this list — "a pity, for sure, but you can't help it, boys will be boys" — it is the mundane, essentialised and dreadful expression of this very differentialist systemic violence who allows some to oppress many, in telling them what to think, how to think, to designate the expression of their mind as "opinion" or "valuable thinking" regarding a validation framework that has been too insufficiently deconstructed yet. I keep in mind the pitiful incidents that opposed The Decolonising Design Group and DRS in 2016, then the Papanek Foundation in 2019.
Dear Don, as long as this place won't be safe for female academics to ask their male counterparts to "do their homework" as Ahmed Ansari put it, as long as young scholars will be lectured, as long as the referential framework for design will be rooted in the Western psyche and historiography, as long as we won't be able to adress humbly and sincerely the most serious ethical issues of systemic violence in design and design academia, as long as the privileged among us won't be able to understand that they sometimes need to remain silent to welcome us, we'll leave.
This is what Albert Hirscman has framed in Exit, Voice & Loyalty : while many of us are still remaining loyal to the institution and what it has to offer, some of us find no other choice than voicing the disagreement and/or leave.
So if you want us to stay, it is the responsability for the most privileged to understand how they prevent this place to be an actual safe intellectual haven.
Do your homework.
Tiphaine KAZI-TANI,
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