Women writing design scholarship : reconfiguring academic work in design
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2013
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This thesis proposes design scholarship as a term that strategically positions women as central
to academic work in (visual communication) design. My use of this term represents a feminist
rewriting of the historically gendered relations between design and writing in the university
since the increase in women's perticipation in design scholarship in the mid-1980's. The term
disrupts gender divisions in academic work and reconfigures the representation of qualitative
research as the visual interplay between words, images and design elements.
The term design scholarship responds to the question of how are women placed in academic
work in design in universities by countering the gendered narratives and restorative histories
through which women are represented in the design literature and discourse. The research is
future-oriented, and explores possibilities as well as constraits, to ask, what options do
women take up in gendered university, and with what effects and what possibilities?
The thesis has four methodological components. First, it documents the historical emergence
of design scholarship from the perspective of women design academics. It therefore
represents the first empirical study about women who work in design in universities. Second,
theoretically derived tools analyse the experiences of a small number of women to identify
patterns and draw conclusions about the cumulative effect of their work on the trajectory of
design scholarship. The analysis offers new terms to describe how women negotiate their
scholarly work in design. Third, it contributes a new feminist analytical framing with which to
analyse gendering in the university. Finally, it contributes a new methodological approach to
analysing qualitative research data and representing this analysis through design methods.
The research involved interviews with fifteen women design academics working in nine
universities in Australia, the United Kingdom and Europe. The data was transcribed, analysed
and visually represented in different ways throughout the thesis. Despite the gendered
conditions under which they work, it is argued that women are active, legitimate subjects who
actively shape knowledge production in design, the effects of which are disseminated to non-
design and non-academic audiences. What this reserach seeks to produce is an assemblage of
accounts and engagements with the scholarly project of design by women that challenges the
existing design literature and discourse and reconfigures design scholarship for the future.
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