Queer culture is always at risk of illegibility, invisibility, and erasure. How do marginalized communities publish and preserve evidence of queer life? Paul situates Library of the Printed Web, Queer.Archive.Work, and other projects within an ongoing trajectory of artists and designers who use queer strategies to engage with independent publishing, design, and archival practices. “Bad Archives and Other Failures” advocates for slowness, care, mutuality, queer joy, pleasure, refusal, and community by focusing on the generous exchange of artifacts and strategies that circulate in crisis. From very early experiments on the internet to 90s transgender zine publishing to radical print collectives, Paul examines alternative networks that form in marginalized communities as a matter of survival. He presents examples of community organizing and archival justice, and their messy, queer, and non-cooperative logics. Additionally, Paul connects these alternative approaches to crucial questions in teaching and learning today, towards a more pluralistic approach to art and design pedagogy.

HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education is a practical guide and a collaborative intervention in art and design pedagogy. HANDBOOK is also a collaboratively produced artist book with a hand-printed letterpress cover. My presentation considers processes of studio production, physical “objectness,” and distribution as models for pedagogy-in-the-making. The handmade book is a methodology and an orientation, a connection point between publishing, transpedagogies, and embodied art practices. I argue that artist publishing and print media offer demanding and multifaceted forms of production for trans and queer pedagogy. I center on the studio as a site that both intertwines with and exceeds equity work. To see these methods of studio-based and collaborative work in action requires reading Handbook beyond its written content; a closer look at the materiality and processes of artist publishing reveals useful daily practices of support and survival of trans and queer life in academia and beyond.

The Design Economies Report 2018 identified that the UK’s design workforce is 78% male despite women making up 63% of students studying creative arts and design at university. These statistics are echoed in a South African context, with extreme gender imbalances in the disciplines of architecture, multimedia and industrial design.* Working cross-nationally, researchers at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa (RSA) and Falmouth University in the United Kingdom (UK) developed Unequal Stories, a multi-method research project that sought to assess gender diversity, equality and representation across different creative disciplines in HE and Industry in the UK and RSA, and respond to the findings through a pedagogic intervention.

In the eight years, four universities, three countries, and two continents where I studied design, feminism was consistently and revealingly absent from the curriculum. In this lecture, I go back to the several classrooms I occupied, looking for tangible clues to explain this absence. The story begins with my upbringing in the Brazilian countryside of the 1990s, the decade that, according to journalist Allison Yarrow, “destroyed women and poisoned girlhood.” Looking for missing and broken links, we’ll go back in time to explore the Women in Print Movement, which spiked in the late 1970s and ignited an international network of feminist publishers, editors, and booksellers who directly influenced the emerging field of design studies. In the late 1980s, neoliberal measures pushed many of these initiatives into bankruptcy, severing feminist design literacies from future generations. Bridging my design education in Brazil and the Netherlands during the late 2000s and early 2010s, we’ll explore tensions between the chauvinist media “raunch culture” and the growing organized feminist grassroots movements that finally exploded in the mid-2010s, drastically reigniting the ties between design and feminism.