As the present-day reality is in constant motion, so are practices serving various ways of knowledge production. Academic knowledge, with the help of some of its creators, tries to escape the boundaries that have already proven to be limiting. Certainly, that does not mean that the production of academic knowledge is somehow outdated – on…

To quote Jon McKenzie from this seminar, “theory is the problem, not the solution”, (McKenzie, Harvey, and Cinibulk 2021). Emphasizing the importance for the academy to engage with the world, McKenzie suggests that we merge critical thinking with critical design, “becoming cosmographer or co-designer of worlds” (McKenzie 2019). Critical design in this case extends media-making…

It seems that Jon Mckenzie posits the gap between doxa and episteme as a productive negative space that can reveal new forms of knowledge. These terms differentiate between the entangled, contextual knowing that is placed against formal knowledge production. My studies in media, art and performance have shown that we can engage with meaning through…

In this session with Jon McKenzie, Lara Harvey and Veronica Cinibulk from Cornell University (January 27, 2021), we were introduced to the term Design Justice. This is an ongoing movement where communities and individuals would strategically use cultural performance forms to carry out activism work through persuasive, human-centered content. While the inherent positioning is one…

In a whirlwind of energy, Jon McKenzie started the 4th Transmission in Motion seminar on January 27th, 2021. Once his PowerPoint is shared, he is off: introducing himself, ‘Perform or Else’, the concept of design justice, and then he states the following: Doxa is ‘the world’ and episteme is ‘theory’, and theory is ‘the problem’….

Right now, I am just finishing up on a data-driven research project on algorithmic bias in the Dutch job seeking process. Recently, a question arose amongst the members of the research team: how might such a project actually yield the knowledge necessary to exact any real change in practice? It is a question that had…

In his book Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement: A Studiolab Manifesto (2019) Jon McKenzie advocates the remix of episteme – expert knowledge – and doxa – common knowledge – in order, in McKenzie words, “to open up the unknown within the known” (McKenzie 2019, 60). The encounter between these two forms of…

Many highly influential global movements that strive to end injustice have traveled via social media across the ocean from the United States to Europe. #MeToo, the global movement against sexual harassment, and Black Lives Matter, the global movement against racism, originated in the United States but have ever since spread across the world. These movements…

Since Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon had first described “design thinking” in 1969, the methodology of design thinking and its variations have been adopted by all walks of life. It is an iterative process in which alternative strategies and solutions are developed to tackle the human-centered problem, generally including five phases: empathy, define, ideate, prototype,…

In the seminar of “The Cardiff Race Riots (1919): retraced, redrawn”, Mike Pearson, Professor Emeritus of Performance Studies at Aberystwyth University, shared his research project undertaken with National Theatre Wales about the Cardiff Race Riots. Personally speaking, among all the elements he used to retrace the historical event, those landmark buildings on the map of…