A Hauntology of Participatory Speculation

Abstract

In this paper I conduct a hauntological analysis of participatory speculation, within the context of a study into understanding the potential for increasing recognition of LGBT+ young people's experiences of hate crime and hate incidents. Hauntology provides a means to further situate accounts of speculation in Participatory Design by sensitising us to the interplay of the virtual and the actual that enables us to expand our sense of the possible. Through understanding how participatory speculation is shaped by absent presences, this paper contributes to the discussion of post-solutionist practices in PD that foster care and responsibility across multiple sites and forms of participation in the face of issues that resist resolution. I conclude by considering by translating speculation into shared spaces of wonder, Participatory Design can foster ethical commitments that stay with the trouble.

Mapping the scientific knowledge and approaches to defining and measuring hate crime, hate speech, and hate incidents: A systematic review

“… Hate incidents are an encounter in which difference is perceived but is responded to with violence rather than care. Hate incidents are rooted in a confrontation with an other that seeks to violently reaffirm boundaries and identities through a refusal to become with and respond to that other's alterity (Gatehouse, 2020 ). I define ‘hate speech’, understood as words and expressions uttered with the aim of mortifying, denigrating, dehumanising and inferiorizing the people to whom they refer, as well as encouraging and fomenting prejudice, hostility, if not gratuitous violence against the chosen victims (translated from Italian language using Google Scholar; Lunaria, 2020a ).…”

Methodologically materialising hate: Incorporating participatory design methods within qualitative research on crime and victimisation

“…RTD, therefore, gains much of its methodological rigour from giving a situated and reflexive account of methods in use (Zimmerman et al, 2007). The indeterminacy, risk and improvisation present in RTD are arguably vital components of design as a creative research practice as they allow us to remain open to the unexpected answer to our research questions (Gatehouse, 2020;Yee and Bremner, 2011). This is why design is of a particular methodological benefit to expanding the sociological and criminological imagination within exploratory and speculative research.…”

“…Speculative design methods enable one to experiment with 'impossible' responses and validate the emotions, feelings and need for resolutions, as demonstrated by participants. The design process allows us to remain open to further meaning making by ourselves or by participants (Gatehouse, 2020), such as bridging adult-centric constructions of hate crime to youth experiences of bullying. Combined, these offer a means to expand the criminological imagination through dialogue with research participants by giving all kinds of participants an active say in how criminology imagines them.…”

Care-full Collectives and their Care Practices

“…This anticipation can also shape our behaviour, even if the thing anticipated is never realised. Speculation, as a practice that aims to generate previously unanticipated futures, could be understood as an attempt to reconfigure these patterns so that both futures and past might manifest themselves differently" (Gatehouse 2020) Through the future studies studio, I explored the various socio political alternatives that could have arisen in preindependence India. Furthermore, how these alternatives would affect the technological realms that are in place in our country today.…”