Design as Symbolic Violence. Design for Social Justice.

Design embeds ideas in communication and artefacts in subtle and psychologically powerful ways. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term ‘symbolic violence’ to describe how powerful ideologies, priorities, values and even sensibilities are constructed and reproduced through cultural institutions, processes and practices. Through symbolic violence, individuals learn to consider unjust conditions as natural and even come to value customs and ideas that are oppressive. Symbolic violence normalises structural violence and enables real violence to take place, often preceding it and later justifying it. Feminist, class, race and indigenous scholars and activists describe how oppressions (how patriarchy, racism, colonialism, etc.) exist within institutions and structures, and also within cultural practices that embed ideologies into everyday life. 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 can function as an enabler for the exploitation of certain groups of people and the environment they (and ultimately ‘we’) depend on to live. Design functions as symbolic violence when it is involved with the creation and reproduction of ideas, practices, tools and processes that result in structural and other types of violence (including ecocide). Breaking symbolic violence involves discovering how it works and building capacities to challenge and transform dysfunctional ideologies, structures and institutions. This conversation will give participants an opportunity to discuss, critique and/or develop the theory of design as symbolic violence as a basis for the development of design strategies for social justice.

Fucking Failures: The Future of Fat Sex

In the context of the obesity ‘epidemic’ fat people’s sex lives are cast as sterile, sexually dysfunctional or just plain non-existent. This article analyzes medical discourses of obesity and sex in order to argue that fat sex is constructed as a type of failure. Using insights from antisocial queer theory, fat sex is further shown to be queer in its failure to adhere to the specifically heteronormative dictates of what Edelman (2004) calls ‘reproductive futurism’. The analysis finally engages with Halberstam’s (2011) notion of queer failure to demonstrate how deconstructing notions of success and failure might offer fat political projects new ways to imagine the future of fat sex.