Hi all, 

before we celebrate our capacity for Gibson’s idea of self-governance (thanks for your explanation Bob), perhaps a bit of reading on feminist takes on Foucault's (1970/71) discipline might help in terms of understand the operation of gendered practices, in this case, how things are done and said on this list.  

I cite the following from my dissertation (Clerke 2012, pp. 69–70), because I know it’s sometimes difficult to plow through 100,000 word documents to discover stuff. Especially feminist stuff for those new to the ideas.

Discipline is that to which we are subject and through which we are subjectified according to the intersections of gender, race, class, age, ability etc.  Yet, ‘Discipline is unauthored, anonymous. It is not owned by those it disciplines and remains a discipline only as long as it can continue to produce – ‘ad infinitum—fresh propositions’ (cited by Threadgold 1997, p. 23). In other words, disciplines operate to control chance, while containing bodies and speech [particularly explains how ‘unruly’ or what Elizabeth Grosz (1994) calls ‘volatile’ bodies and speeches are contained on this list]. This happens through rewriting. 

Broadly, rewriting can be understood as a textual process of recitation. Through rewriting, what is already known about a topic, event or phenomenon can be transformed by new knowledge or new ways of writing and transmitted to audiences as text. Precisely because records of historical events were written by men, these records form what Foucault (1978) called the archive, which is the collection of texts, conversations and documents (Threadgold 1997, p. 145) constructed from the ‘proper place of power’ (p. 72). Rewriting performs a recitation of the archive, which organises, reproduces and transmits masculine discourses over long periods of historical time. 

For Threadgold, rewriting is textual and symbolic work that signals the recent turn in feminism to writing as personal, political and transgressive (Braidotti 1994; Clegg & David 2006; Hughes 2002). In Feminist poetics: poiesis, performance, histories, Threadgold deploys women’s previously undocumented family memories of an historical event to rewrite a gendered and raced account that makes alternative meanings of this event possible. Rewriting is the textual strategy through which Threadgold transforms knowledge production by drawing on resources outside Foucault’s (1978) archive, that intervenes in the transmission of masculine knowledge, practices and processes.

So the good news is, however, because they rely on the continual reproduction of discourse, disciplines are also subject to change. 
Women’s stories constitute possibilities for generating alternative theories and perspectives for living and writing (Richardson 2000, p. 934). Rewriting stories enables us to break boundaries and produce breaches (Bendix Petersen 2007) in dominant ways of knowing the world. Rewriting is both a methodological strategy through which the gendering of knowledge production processes and discourses in design may be breached and transformed, and also the site in which the writing subject herself is transformed. By this I mean that the idea of women writing design scholarship transforms scholarly work in design from the perspective of women, which rewrites women as active and legitimate subjects of design. Attending to the specificities and particularities of individual women’s working lives in universities disrupts the narratives of representing that dominate the design literature. Refusing these narratives necessitates a feminist and poststructuralist concern for specificity and heterogeneity, which the multiple place stories in this dissertation describe.

So you see Johann, personal views/stories do have a place in research classes. And on this list, those whose voices have been elided through gendered practices perform the task of disrupting disciplinary discourses.  

all the best, 
teena

> On 27 Jan 2017, at 7:35 AM, Filippo Salustri <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> On 26 January 2017 at 14:16, Bob Este <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> [...]
>> Instead, GIbson was talking about "collaborative alignments" among
>> people's moral compasses (internal and unique to each individual, but
>> contextually and carefully shared, as in a web), predicated on loosely
>> coupled but more or less common understandings linked through
>> communications that are kept relatively clear. Such conditions of
>> "collaborative alignment" allow all social members to "police" (govern)
>> themselves in accord with overarching principles and actions that everyone
>> collectively determines are, over time, in the best interests of all, given
>> evolving circumstances. Such an approach to governance both allows and
>> expects all members, again over time and especially with careful
>> deliberation, to continuously examine and re-examine those principles and
>> their decision consequences, and gradually and reflectively (not
>> reflexively) adjust them as they see fit. We have many examples both
>> historically and currently of "collaborative alignment governance" that, it
>> seems, large numbers of people strongly prefer and rationally work towards
>> as their "world framework".
>> [...]
> 
> 
> This whole post - but this paragraph in particular - is IMHO brilliant. Ima
> gonna print this and hang it on my office wall. :-)
> 
> 



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