The Question for the Ph.D.
Within the path of my career, here’s the specific question I’m digging around in for the next few years. Plus connected literature.
How might I set up a new practice as a community organizer, facilitator, and interviewer that’s non-institutionalized and reflects my values?
The (re)forming I’m doing with my practice is in direct response the the studio I set up with two graduate school colleagues in New York. I want my part of the work in the studio to change.
In 2015, we started by wanting to fill this gap in the design, film, and education fields we were used to being in. We were calling for a more nuanced way of understanding people as complicated. We felt industrial, commercially-informed styles of design weren’t cutting it, and I didn’t want to be a part of that. Matter–Mind Studio was our way of filling a ‘blind spot’ and getting to work on a career path that’s exactly what we wanted on our terms. Over time, we’ve named this thing we’re calling for Emotion-Centered Design. We’ve been working with people in after-school programs, museums, public health organizations, and tech startups to better understand the participants of their work and to design strategies, do research, and design spaces or objects for them to better take care of their participants. Emotion-Centered Design is really a set of methods and tools we use to do those things. For more than a year or so, I’ve felt what we’re doing isn’t what I want my part of the studio to look and feel. We’re working on interesting projects but they don’t quite feel exactly what I started with–this rich, nuanced thing about how people are complicated. The ‘blind spot’ I’m interested in isn’t at all a gap in the market or a gap in the way a service is delivered. Within the context of my studio, I’m refreshing and specifying what I mean by the ‘blind spot’ through the next few years of research.
The studio and it’s confines can’t define the work I’m doing in the Ph.D., nor do I want it to. More widely, I’m moving on from proving to myself people make meaning from objects and use them to cope. I’m now moving on to our relationship with physical stuff as acts of resistance and as a radical form of taking up space. I’m honing in on people’s living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms and the stuff in them, themselves, as resistance and radical action-taking.
In the most simple way, in the new iteration of my practice I want to be a community organizer. By that I mean someone who feels belonging in a small community, plays an important and equal role in it, and serves the community. I want the people I work with to be prioritized in my work, rather than a ‘client,’ ‘institution,’ or my fixations.
Connected Literature
How might I set up a new practice as a community organizer, facilitator, and interviewer that’s non-institutionalized and reflects my values?
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years Chapter 2 The Myth of the Barter
Debt, in its second chapter The Myth of the Barter flips the history of studying money on its head. When it comes to compensating the time and energy of people I work with, I want to be rigorous about the methods behind it and the decisions I come to.
We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around.
Otrude N. Moyo, Navigating my journey towards learning Ubuntu — A way of decolonizing myself
This passage is about the South African ethos and philosophy of Ubuntu. It echos what Yoko Akama, Stacy Holman Jones and Sonali Ojha wrote to me. They reinforced that I’ll need to be the space where people can safely share stories and lean on and at the same take care of myself.
The research uses collaborative ethnography as a way to engage community in exploring perspectives of Ubuntu. I say collaborative ethnography to mean the deliberate and explicit collaboration at every point of the research process, conceptualization of the project, fieldwork, and writing. Also, I use collaborative in the the interview and the actual telling of the story of Ubuntu. Most importantly, how the avenue of gathering about Ubuntu and dialoguing about Ubuntu could become a community’s way of coming together to improve quality of life.
Teal Triggs, Fanzines
Triggs points to the function fanzines that reflects the situatedness, de-institutionalized quality, and partiality that I’m looking to practice in my writing and my work with people.
Through the DIY nature of their production, fanzines take on an enhanced value in how they contribute to and reflect a broader everyday cultural experience. … Fanzines exist as genuine human voices outside of all mass manipulation.
[Fanzines] are less concerned about copyright, grammar, spelling, punctuation, page layout, grids and typography.”
Ask me for pdfs of these things if you’re interested!
Graeber, David. Debt : The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, (2011): 40
Moyo, Otrude. “Navigating My Journey towards Learning Ubuntu-A Way of Decolonizing Myself.” Reflections : Narratives of Professional Helping 22, no. 2 (2016): 74–81.
Triggs, Teal. Fanzines. London: Thames & Hudson, 2010.
