ABSTRACT
Working through a close reading of research by scholars in African-American History and Literature, Women and Gender Studies, Sociology (and at their intersections), I ask where we might find, and how we might learn from, the kinds of knowing and living otherwise that take place and take shape in conditions of precarity, domination, and escape. This reading engenders an orientation to design that engages crises as conditions of existence that are necessarily relational and non-linear, and, therefore, call for practitioners and scholars to refuse narratives of progress and closure as routes to ‘good’ answers, and remain open to making otherwise and with the unknown. How might designing exist in direct relation to the refusal to be governed, to the refusal of servitude, and to the provocation these refusals invite to make systems, ideas, and relations that are, fundamentally, generative for living otherwise?
