Queering Interdisciplinarity: in conversation with

Working in collaboration with Nina Trivedi

Queering Interdisciplinarity – A Series of Conversations with Staff

We organised a series of 6-8 conversations with staff members across the 4 programmes of S School, exploring how queerness and interdisciplinarity intersect within their creative and pedagogical practices. These discussions will served as a way to document, reflect on, and expand definitions of both interdisciplinary work and queer thinking in design education.

Each conversation investigated core questions: What does “queering interdisciplinary” mean in your practice? How do queer theory, structures, or values inform your work or teaching? What processes are inherent to your way of working, and how do they manifest from start to finish in a project? What are the critical milestones—such as observation, prototyping, or reflection—that shape your approach?

The aim is to build a holistic overview of how knowledge and practice emerge across multiple modes. Connecting making with thinking, the mind with the hand. This project frames queerness as a navigational tool; one that resists singular definitions and embraces fluid, embodied, and situated knowledge. It asks how design practices can move away from fixed outcomes and instead form adaptable systems of learning and making.

The insights from these conversations informed a publication, acting as both archive and space for continued reflection. An index wheel was also created to view themes that came up in the conversations, in four main categories: gestures, methods, milestones and references.Using the cut-out windows, random combinations can be generated in order to create ways to queer your methodologies or facilitation of teaching.This is a beginning point in this project which we intend to further develop into a larger staff workshop in the next academic year and we also intend to involve student voices. Eventually we aim to create a digital resource for staff and students within S- School.