Register
Event Details
Call for Papers: Diseña Special Issue #30 – Minor Gestures
This call for proposals invites examples, discussions, and outlines of minor gestures through a broad range of radical positions―in space, in place, in discourse, as much as in praxis―to continue shaping the world while changing the world.
GUEST EDITORS:
Danah Abdulla | University of the Arts London
Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira | Universität der Künste Berlin
Submission deadline:
April 26, 2026
Expected publication date:
January 2027
https://www.revistadisena.uc.cl/index.php/Disena/announcement/view/500
Since the publication of the article ‘The Case for Minor Gestures’ in Diseña #22 in 2023, the expansion of crises and the illusion of insurmountability have escalated significantly. Design, as a future-thinking discipline, always appears unprepared for the future. The problem with the future is that it keeps us constantly thinking of times of crisis as something happening in the future rather than currently happening. Therefore, we design for what is to come rather than what already is. When the design arrives, the what has already destroyed what is to come, rendering the design irrelevant.
Our offering to think of minor gestures as a theory-in-the-making, in a constant state of incompleteness―not as a method or set of specific guidelines that can be turned into metrics and numbers, but as an arrangement of practices that renders provisionality its core characteristic―becomes an important device to enact the possibility of a future. Minor gestures are localized, subversive acts that can be performed to expand the limits of a given enclosed system. Minor gestures are also exercises in careful exclusion, for inclusion does not mean totality. Ultimately, they are spaces to ignite imagination: a way of enabling us to become critically informed citizens through the creation of spaces in which we can sense, view, and think about the world in order to transform it.
Examples of minor gestures are abundant: Ailton Krenak’s ‘parachutes’ (2020), which slow us down from the fall we are experiencing, are mechanisms for thinking and acting that allow for perspective, for strategizing, and ultimately, for change; the persistence of anti-genocide actions all over the world, including those from Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied Territories―bearing witness and refusing to remain silent or complicit in the face of political, institutional, and algorithmic (therefore, designed) obscurations of violence. A minor gesture can also be an act of careful disassembly of a given system, such as Jota Mombaça’s (2021) call for an ‘ontological strike’―a need to stop and care for that which must decay and disappear, so that we survive.
Considered in this way, minor gestures are not about stark definitions but about movements towards provisional assemblages. They are about what is being done and can be done now, rather than speculations about major structural change disconnected from urgent everyday realities. Yet minor gestures unfold with the thought that it is only through collective, slow, subversive, and surreptitious motion and movement that major structural change can happen over time.
This call for proposals invites examples, discussions, and outlines of minor gestures through a broad range of radical positions―in space, in place, in discourse, as much as in praxis―to continue shaping the world while changing the world.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
-Design as a space of possibilities, where strategies for problem-finding, rather than problem-solving, can be drawn.
-Para-curricular modes of studying and action within, without, and beyond the classroom.
-Minor acts of institutional disobedience enacted by (but not exclusively through) design projects.
-Subversive modes of studying and action within classrooms, universities, and institutions.
-Experiments, studies, and theories-in-the-making for new forms of political action and disruption.
-Design propositions for workers organizing against the grain of algorithmic governance.
-Project-disoriented, rather than project-oriented, design ideas and strategies.
Contributions can be theoretical, empirical, and/ or visual, and should not shy away from sharing provocative ideas that make readers think and question. We welcome contributions featuring perspectives from disciplines beyond design, and/ or those that recast design in a different light.
References
Abdulla, D., & Vieira de Oliveira, P. J. S. (2023). The Case for Minor Gestures. Diseña, (22), 6–6. https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.22.Article.6
Krenak, A. (2020). Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (A. Doyle, Trans.). House of Anansi Press Incorporated.
Mombaça, J. (2021). Não vão nos matar agora. Cobogó.
