535-Boehnert-Symbolic-Violence-DRS2016-Conv.pdf (1.16 MB)
Design a symbolic violence: Addressing the ‘isms’
conference contribution
posted on 2018-11-29, 15:03 authored by Joanna Boehnert, Bianca Elzenbaumer, Dimeji OnafuwaDesign embeds ideas in communication, artifacts, services and spaces in subtle and
psychologically powerful ways. Feminist, class, race and indigenous scholars and activists
describe how oppressions (how patriarchy, racism, colonialism, etc.) exist within institutions
and also within cultural practices. The theory of symbolic violence sheds light on how design
can function to naturalise oppressions and then obfuscate power relations around this
process. Through symbolic violence, design enables the exploitation of certain groups of
people and the environment they (and ultimately ʻweʼ) depend on to live. Design functions
as symbolic violence when it is involved with the creation and reproduction of ideas,
practices, processes and tools that result in structural and other types of violence (including
ecocide).
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- Arts
Published in
DRS2016: Design + Research + Society: Future Focused ThinkingCitation
BOEHNERT, J., ELZENBAUMER, B. and ONAFUWA, D., 2016. Design a Symbolic Violence: Addressing the ‘isms’. A conversation held at DRS2016: Design + Research + Society: Future Focused Thinking on June 29th 2016, University of Brighton.Publisher
Design Research SocietyVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Acceptance date
2016-06-01Publication date
2016Notes
This document contains conversation proposal (from p. 1) and documentation (from p. 6). This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Design Research Society under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Publisher version
Language
- en