Books by Ece Canlı
PhD Dissertation, 2018, 2017
is a doctoral research that propounds a critical inquiry into the intersection of design practice... more is a doctoral research that propounds a critical inquiry into the intersection of design practice and queer theory, where the interrelationship between power, gender performativity, sexuality, identity politics and material practices are unfolded. It investigates how design, as the material [re]configuration of the world, is an active agent in privileging and superiorising certain bodies while oppressing, inferiorising and marginalising ‘others’, by systematically reifying hetero-cis-normativity and identity-based segregation. Scrutinising the role of the artificial in engendering inclusions and exclusions in society, this research uncovers design’s direct contribution in reproducing the body materially—or turning it into material body, as body-thing—under the logic of modern/colonial/capitalist economy. In addition, it undertakes to undo this ongoing colonial logic and offers strategies to unlearn the ontological and epistemic foundations of design’s disciplinary—yet biased—condition. Drawing from intersectional and decolonial queer feminist theories and deeming designing and queering as two antidotal yet interconnected verbly concepts, it elaborates on a possible queered design approach that would act against the current material and corporeal regimes regulated by hegemonic power.
With the aim of ‘queerying’ (as querying and queering) design, the research operates at the theory-practice nexus, adopting a set of critically situated methodologies. Considering the concept of queering as undesigning, as a counter-hegemonic act to interrupt existing oppressive materialities, it unravels designed practices both discursively and materially. This material-discursive act of deconstruction, as a form of de/re-configuration, enacts on three different yet interrelated foci of reading and intervention: sartorial, discursive and spatial in which clothes (i.e. bodily artefacts, accessories), discourses (i.e. languages, words) and spaces (i.e. bathrooms, prisons) are examined in particular. With the body at their junction point, these three main lines of investigation epitomise how such designed productions segregate and regulate bodies systematically, based on binary identity categories. In a pursuit of possible forms of de/re-configurations of them, the research then ventures on the practice of deconstruction with a series of workshops in collaboration with non-practitioner [queer] activists who are directly inflicted by the effects of design. Through this, the research also offers new forms of collective un/re-making and epistemic shift for un/re-learning.
Book Chapters by Ece Canlı
The Handbook of Global Sexualities, edited by Zowie Davy et al. pp. 313-333. London: SAGE, 2020
The more mass incarceration accelerates and the prison industrial complex expands globally, the m... more The more mass incarceration accelerates and the prison industrial complex expands globally, the more marginalised bodies are put behind bars. Amongst the most affected by this punitive regime are gendered, sexualised, racialised and impoverished bodies, including queer and LGBTI+ individuals, who continue being subjected to further discrimination, violence and isolation before, during and after the imprisonment. Aiming to contribute to the emerging debates on the issue, this chapter offers an overview on the conditions and effects of queer incarceration in global and local scales. By looking at the broader political economy behind prison industry and criminalisation, from an intersectional perspective, it argues how queer incarceration is yet another project of coloniality that reproduces ‘abject bodies’, corroborated by sociospatial segregation as a neoliberal financial order. Within this framework, in the light of various examples and practices, the chapter first reflects on the common problems LGBTI inmates face worldwide and then focuses on Turkey to highlight the issue from a site-specific viewpoint. In conclusion, after touching upon several reformist practices, it not only puts forward prison abolitionism as a worldview, but also discusses its possibilities in the context of Turkey, and possibly for the rest of the Global South.
Design and Agency: Critical Perspective on Identities, Histories and Practices, edited by John Potvin and Marie-Ève Marchand, pp. 287-299. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020
An overview of the relationship between materiality, identity and the question of agency, in the ... more An overview of the relationship between materiality, identity and the question of agency, in the light of material culture studies, performativity, queer theory, agential realism and ontological design.
Sense & Sensibility, edited by Pernilla Ellens, 175-181. Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2018
The Responsible Object: A History of Design Ideology for the Future, edited by Marjanne van Helvert, 187-207. Amsterdam: Valid, 2016
A critical look at the design history from the perspective of queer feminism and intersectionality,
Articles by Ece Canlı
The Design Journal 21(5): 651-669, 2018
This article offers a critical reading on how the binary logic, as a milestone of Western moderni... more This article offers a critical reading on how the binary logic, as a milestone of Western modernity, resides in the very construction and reproduction of gender and design. Through a decolonial queer feminist lens, it argues how the binary regime of gender, sexuality and identity is constitutive of and constituted by dichotomously designed materialities, fostering systematic categorization and segregation of bodies. It unfolds the interdependence between material-based and gender-based segregation by epitomizing some prominent binary visual, spatial and sartorial material practices as the designed that corroborate the system of identity-based inclusion/exclusion and privilege/oppression. To go beyond such dichotomizations, the article, then, proposes an epistemological and methodological shift for designers and design researchers as a possible way of challenging binary regimes from within the design discipline.
Design and Culture Journal, 2018
Design and Culture Journal, 2018
This roundtable was conducted by the eight founding members of Decolonising Design Group in Octob... more This roundtable was conducted by the eight founding members of Decolonising Design Group in October 2017, using an online messaging platform. Each member approached design and decoloniality from different yet interrelating viewpoints, by threading their individual arguments with the preceding ones. The piece thus offers and travels through a variety of subject matter including politics of design, artificiality, modernity, Eurocentrism, capitalism, Indigenous Knowledge, pluriversality, continental philosophy, pedagogy, materiality, mobility, language, gender oppression, sexuality, and intersectionality.
METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 33(2): 227-245, 2016
The aim of this research is to investigate how design can be practised to facilitate self-express... more The aim of this research is to investigate how design can be practised to facilitate self-expression of women, suffering from sexual harassment in universities. The underlying statement, of using design to counteract harassment, is to indicate that design activity can be utilised not only for industrial interests, but also in the realm of socio-political issues such as gender activism and women’s struggles. With this aim, in a two-year practice-based design research entitled Silence of Academy, a series of workshops was initiated and facilitated by the design researcher–as the first author of this article–in collaboration with an undergraduate women’s association. During the workshops, the undergraduate woman participants, who were directly or indirectly exposed to sexual harassment in universities, sought for an alternative medium to tackle, divulge and speak out the silenced experiences of sexual harassment. By doing so, participants explored the possible ways to create space for their self-representations, not as subordinated or surrendered subjects, but as active agents. They created collective narratives based on their own shared experiences, later captured and amplified by the researcher’s design interventions for further actions. At the end of the process, the articulation of harassment was presented as a physical artefact, in the form of a dictionary, also used as a public intervention to encounter the academic milieu beyond the women’s circle. In this article, after the issue of sexual harassment and the engagement of women’s voices in design is contextualised, the process of design research will be explained through the methodology which is based on participation, storytelling and self-documentation. Moreover, the analysis will focus on how socially-politically engaged design activity can be used to enhance the medium for women’s dialogues, and to empower women in resistance by facilitating their self-representations.
Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 7(1): 19-39, 2015
In summer 2013, Istanbul was shaken by an enormous public protest which, besides its afflictive t... more In summer 2013, Istanbul was shaken by an enormous public protest which, besides its afflictive traces, engraved a great image of solidarity and change in the political history of Turkey. Whilst this solidarity comprised diverse groups of different political ideologies and identities, some of the most outstanding actors of the revolts were women and LGBT individuals who have been suffering from state oppression as gendered bodies. The Gezi Park occupation not only enabled them to experience new forms of mobilization but also altered the perception of gender on a greater scale during the revolts. Starting with an overview of the driving forces of the Gezi Park riots, this paper focuses on this practice of mobilization and the question of how gendered bodies could build a collective identity through the immediate moments of solidarity via reclaiming public space as politicized bodies during the revolts. It also addresses the potential ways in which these newly learnt strategies can be used for the future politics. These inquiries draw on our personal observations and oral testimonies of the protestors in interviews. Lastly, it hopes to provoke further discussions about the future politics of gender activism in Turkey.
Symposiums, Workshops & Seminars by Ece Canlı
by Mahmoud Keshavarz, Clive Dilnot, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Pedro J S Vieira de Oliveira, Matthew Kiem, Ece Canlı, Ahmed Ansari, Tristan Schultz, Joanna Boehnert, Paola Pierri, and Isabel Mager Today the topic of design and politics is not unfamiliar to designers or those in politics. Yet d... more Today the topic of design and politics is not unfamiliar to designers or those in politics. Yet despite designers’ engagement in community-based activities, design discourse has not been able yet to produce a useful lexicon of concepts that could offer possibilities of acting politically through design. The reason behind this could be seen in various complexities and difficulties involved in such possible discourses.
One way to approach such difficulties is through an intra-disciplinary engagement not with the fields of design and politics but with the effects that design and politics produce through a series of internal, mutual co-relations. These effects are manifested and produced not merely through legislative and institutional practices, but through designed artefacts, spaces, sites and technologies. Ranging from gentrified public squares to high security checkpoints, from precarious production lines to everyday gendered goods, such material co-enactments of design and politics regulate and manipulate people’s bodies, abilities, movements, inhabitations and life conditions in various ways, based on their race, ethnicity, social and legal status, gender and sexuality. From this perspective, the concept of intersectionality can be a useful frame and method to interrogate how design and politics co-shape each other through power relations across race, gender and class, as well as other identity attributions. Intersectionality teaches us that politics cannot be only understood through rigid power categories but through a matrix of forces and relations that produce different effects in different sites and moments, with different bodies and positions. Scholars in postcolonial feminism have discussed the concept of intersectionality widely and have used it as a method to interrogate various sites and spaces of power.
This symposium is an attempt to initiate a space of thinking for discussing the concept of intersectionality from the agency of design and designing in particular and materiality in general. It seems that intersectionality could be a useful method for understanding the politics and political agency of design:
- How do design and designing participate and reinforce power structures in an intersectional way through and across race, gender and class?
- How can design and designing offer novel ways to understand the ways in which power operates in intersectional ways?
- And possibly how can design and designing propose ways of intervening in such complex and intersectional power relations?
+ This is the full program embedding the links to full papers +
Presentations/Talks by Ece Canlı
(Opening Speech of the Intersectional Perspectives on Design, Politics and Power Symposium, Malmö... more (Opening Speech of the Intersectional Perspectives on Design, Politics and Power Symposium, Malmö University, Sweden, 14-15 November 2016)
Book Reviews by Ece Canlı
Conference Papers by Ece Canlı
Despite today’s increasing visibility of non-normative gender performances and sexualities, the p... more Despite today’s increasing visibility of non-normative gender performances and sexualities, the predominating designed world still shapes and governs bodies through heteronormative codes. Although queer theory has stimulated ground-breaking discussions around such issues along with intersectionality, design discipline has yet to ask itself what kind of material, spatial, visual and virtual productions and thinking it can suggest us other than heteronormative, white, upper-class, Anglo-Saxon-oriented and Eurocentric ones. Drawing from queer theory, in this paper, I will firstly present the existing relations between gender, identity and design. In following, I will underline the activities of designing and queering as modes of doing and undoing. Then, in lieu of conclusion, I will propose how queer idea of de-construction can be used as a method and activity in design to re-articulate sexed and gendered corporealities for an utopian ‘fairness’.
The notion of Queer, today, is in use beyond demarcations not only between different genders and ... more The notion of Queer, today, is in use beyond demarcations not only between different genders and sexualities, but also among diverse disciplines germane to the body politics. However, design, as a part of the system of sexual representation and gender performativity within its visual and material tools, still needs to be purged from heteronormative binaries and dominant man-made praxis that reinforce gender-segregation and exclusion of queer beings. This paper aims to propound a theoretical and methodological framework to open up successive inquiries for a future practice-based design research: 1) What would 'queering' design process in its modus operandi and using 'Queer aesthetics' and 'Queer methodologies' mean as a way of shifting normative scientific knowledge of design into a subversive method? 2) How would this process of queering be implemented in a design practice by non-designers who live queer lives and are excluded from conventional practices and to deconstruct taken-for-granted performative genders? Consequently, the goal is to explore how such design process can reinforce emancipation in the context of gender politics.
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Books by Ece Canlı
With the aim of ‘queerying’ (as querying and queering) design, the research operates at the theory-practice nexus, adopting a set of critically situated methodologies. Considering the concept of queering as undesigning, as a counter-hegemonic act to interrupt existing oppressive materialities, it unravels designed practices both discursively and materially. This material-discursive act of deconstruction, as a form of de/re-configuration, enacts on three different yet interrelated foci of reading and intervention: sartorial, discursive and spatial in which clothes (i.e. bodily artefacts, accessories), discourses (i.e. languages, words) and spaces (i.e. bathrooms, prisons) are examined in particular. With the body at their junction point, these three main lines of investigation epitomise how such designed productions segregate and regulate bodies systematically, based on binary identity categories. In a pursuit of possible forms of de/re-configurations of them, the research then ventures on the practice of deconstruction with a series of workshops in collaboration with non-practitioner [queer] activists who are directly inflicted by the effects of design. Through this, the research also offers new forms of collective un/re-making and epistemic shift for un/re-learning.
Book Chapters by Ece Canlı
Articles by Ece Canlı
Symposiums, Workshops & Seminars by Ece Canlı
One way to approach such difficulties is through an intra-disciplinary engagement not with the fields of design and politics but with the effects that design and politics produce through a series of internal, mutual co-relations. These effects are manifested and produced not merely through legislative and institutional practices, but through designed artefacts, spaces, sites and technologies. Ranging from gentrified public squares to high security checkpoints, from precarious production lines to everyday gendered goods, such material co-enactments of design and politics regulate and manipulate people’s bodies, abilities, movements, inhabitations and life conditions in various ways, based on their race, ethnicity, social and legal status, gender and sexuality. From this perspective, the concept of intersectionality can be a useful frame and method to interrogate how design and politics co-shape each other through power relations across race, gender and class, as well as other identity attributions. Intersectionality teaches us that politics cannot be only understood through rigid power categories but through a matrix of forces and relations that produce different effects in different sites and moments, with different bodies and positions. Scholars in postcolonial feminism have discussed the concept of intersectionality widely and have used it as a method to interrogate various sites and spaces of power.
This symposium is an attempt to initiate a space of thinking for discussing the concept of intersectionality from the agency of design and designing in particular and materiality in general. It seems that intersectionality could be a useful method for understanding the politics and political agency of design:
- How do design and designing participate and reinforce power structures in an intersectional way through and across race, gender and class?
- How can design and designing offer novel ways to understand the ways in which power operates in intersectional ways?
- And possibly how can design and designing propose ways of intervening in such complex and intersectional power relations?
+ This is the full program embedding the links to full papers +
Presentations/Talks by Ece Canlı
Book Reviews by Ece Canlı
Conference Papers by Ece Canlı
With the aim of ‘queerying’ (as querying and queering) design, the research operates at the theory-practice nexus, adopting a set of critically situated methodologies. Considering the concept of queering as undesigning, as a counter-hegemonic act to interrupt existing oppressive materialities, it unravels designed practices both discursively and materially. This material-discursive act of deconstruction, as a form of de/re-configuration, enacts on three different yet interrelated foci of reading and intervention: sartorial, discursive and spatial in which clothes (i.e. bodily artefacts, accessories), discourses (i.e. languages, words) and spaces (i.e. bathrooms, prisons) are examined in particular. With the body at their junction point, these three main lines of investigation epitomise how such designed productions segregate and regulate bodies systematically, based on binary identity categories. In a pursuit of possible forms of de/re-configurations of them, the research then ventures on the practice of deconstruction with a series of workshops in collaboration with non-practitioner [queer] activists who are directly inflicted by the effects of design. Through this, the research also offers new forms of collective un/re-making and epistemic shift for un/re-learning.
One way to approach such difficulties is through an intra-disciplinary engagement not with the fields of design and politics but with the effects that design and politics produce through a series of internal, mutual co-relations. These effects are manifested and produced not merely through legislative and institutional practices, but through designed artefacts, spaces, sites and technologies. Ranging from gentrified public squares to high security checkpoints, from precarious production lines to everyday gendered goods, such material co-enactments of design and politics regulate and manipulate people’s bodies, abilities, movements, inhabitations and life conditions in various ways, based on their race, ethnicity, social and legal status, gender and sexuality. From this perspective, the concept of intersectionality can be a useful frame and method to interrogate how design and politics co-shape each other through power relations across race, gender and class, as well as other identity attributions. Intersectionality teaches us that politics cannot be only understood through rigid power categories but through a matrix of forces and relations that produce different effects in different sites and moments, with different bodies and positions. Scholars in postcolonial feminism have discussed the concept of intersectionality widely and have used it as a method to interrogate various sites and spaces of power.
This symposium is an attempt to initiate a space of thinking for discussing the concept of intersectionality from the agency of design and designing in particular and materiality in general. It seems that intersectionality could be a useful method for understanding the politics and political agency of design:
- How do design and designing participate and reinforce power structures in an intersectional way through and across race, gender and class?
- How can design and designing offer novel ways to understand the ways in which power operates in intersectional ways?
- And possibly how can design and designing propose ways of intervening in such complex and intersectional power relations?
+ This is the full program embedding the links to full papers +