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Hi all, Many years ago when I started my PhD, my (education) supervisor would watch bemused as my (design) supervisor and I would discuss the misconceived perceptions of graphic design that others (designers) had of what we did (graphic, or visual communication design). She would comment on how we literally tossed our heads as we let off steam about these misconceptions and would then say that it is the mark of an immature discipline that continually disputes its boundaries. So I see a lot of head tossing when a comment about the rules of submission and formatting of academic journal leads to boundary disputes, yet again, over what is and what is not design. Instead, why not take up João's rather difficult disciplinary challenge of drawing on the skills in this community in considering how to produce readable academic texts, particularly in the context of online publication that opens up communication channels previously not financially and physically possible in print. I quote from my thesis to make my point: "Power is conceived as a spatial organisation of various forms of cellular grids or nodal networks (Foucault 1970/1971). Organised as social networks, discourses and bodies ‘circulate’ in space, regulated by discipline, which is an apparatus for the control of populations (Threadgold 1997, p. 24). To unpack this a little, bodies and speech are disciplined by discourse, the structured regularities of which are ‘related to the subject through desire…in the form of the power of knowing, and the will to know’ (p. 26). For Threadgold, the ‘microphysics of power’ that organise disciplines function by ‘naming and classifying, distributing and positioning, belong[ing] to no individual but locat[ing] everyone’ (p. 26). Disciplines are regulated by textual practices, while the practices of positioning oneself within a discipline produce the self and also the field. Yet, as Threadgold explains, citing Foucault (1970/1971), ‘Discipline is unauthored, anonymous. It is not owned by those it disciplines and it remains a discipline only as long as it can continue to produce – ‘ad infinitum—fresh propositions’’ (p. 23). In other words, disciplines operate to control chance and contain bodies and speech. Yet because they rely on the continual reproduction of discourse, disciplines are also subject to change” (Clerke 2012, pp. 64–65). This of course means taking a long, hard look at the power relations that discipline how we communicate in this heterogeneous design community. What do you say – designers of the world unite to take up the challenge whereby the historical rules of word-based communication continue to dominate other kinds of texts in design (here, the meaning of text is broader than words alone (to reference Dorothy Smith and Margaret Somerville). And of course, to cite my (education) supervisor, who sadly passed away a week before my thesis result, let us make a ‘textual intervention in the public sphere…[of the] politics of text and commentary’ (Lee 2000, p. 190). teena ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------