Placental Social Ethics: Designing for Epistemologies of Resistance

i thank dr. vink for her impressive analysis of design and introducing me to another method in thinking about institutional organization. I also am deeply grateful for Dr. Vink’s engagement with my work on “Placental Ethics: Addressing Colonial Legacies and Imagining Culturally Safe Responses to Health Care in Hawai̒ i” (Bardwell-Jones) and responding to the call to re-envision alternative design models in guiding institutional operations that seek community engagement. Responding to this paper helped me to think further about the work I began in that article. Dr. Vink’s project carefully reflects on her experience working with communities in Canada on behalf of hospital administration. Seeking input from differently situated communities, she reflects on moments of perplexity and resistance from the community members. Working with members from an Indigenous community, she found that dominant design models “can contribute to the reproduction of coloniality and modernity.” Working with diverse communities in Toronto, she acknowledged the “hypocrisy” of participation when dominant design models failed to acknowledge the ongoing process of local design work within the community. It appears that dominant design within hospital administration understands care as best done by authority. Community members are reduced to data. The cognitive work is done by the experts, who are situated outside the community. There are risks that dominant design models, despite the good intentions motivating the inquiry, may perpetrate unconscious structural gaslighting. Drawing upon Elena Ruiz’s notion of settler epistemic economies that generate structural violence, Nora Berenstain identifies the nature of structural gaslighting as