Critical Fabulation and Stories for Design: Black Feminist Technoscience and the Design Practice of African American Craftswomen
Author(s)
Sherman, Jihan Stanford
Advisor(s)
Editor(s)
Collections
Supplementary to:
Permanent Link
Abstract
The stories we tell about design have set the priorities and practices that we use to create technology and set limits on how they might open other possible futures for the ways we make with the world. This dissertation argues that the dominant story of design has been told as a single story that has overlooked many heritages and practices of it. It looks to stories that are absent in order to destabilize the single story and imagine how we might practice design differently. Building on my personal experiences as a Black woman who is an architect, designer, and craftswoman, this research focuses on African American craftswomen as a group of designers who have been absent from the single story. Shifting our focus to Black women heightens both our understanding of the transgressive systems embedded in design and opportunities to transform it. This dissertation project moves beyond awareness to developing alternatives for design practice itself.
I introduce and develop Black feminist technoscience (BFTS) as a framework for design with six key principles: intersectionality, coming to voice, the personal and situated, (Black) temporalities, (em)bodied ecologies and the ethics of care. As a praxis, the underlying methodological structure of BFTS and this dissertation project is storytelling. I extend critical fabulation, initially developed by Saidiya Hartman and explored for design by Daniela Rosner, as a method of storytelling that engages qualitative analysis, critical theory, and experiments that seek to imagine design and technology differently. I present ethnographic research that explores the histories and practices of six African American craftswomen: Anginique Walker, Adriane Johnson, Jocelyn Dorsey, Frances Bosley, Minnie R. Choice, and Cheryl Cherry-Hill. From this study, this dissertation presents two stories crafted for design centered on African American craftswomen as critical fabulation: “And she taught me how to knit” and “There’s a whole energy that goes into crafting.” These critical fabulation stories are questionings and imaginings of different engagements for design.
Sponsor
Date
2023-07-25
Extent
Resource Type
Text
Resource Subtype
Dissertation