Five Political Provocations for Soma Design: A Relational Perspective on Emotion and Politics

Abstract

Soma design is intimately entangled with the politics, not only of design itself, but of bodies. We combine perspectives from soma design, political theory, and Sara Ahmed’s work The Cultural Politics of Emotions, to develop five political provocations that reflect on the politics of soma design and the possibilities and frictions therein. Inspired by soma design’s roots in somaesthetic philosophy, our five provocations are (i) Knowledge and Ways of Knowing; (ii) The Self and Self-Knowledge; (iii) Felt Ethics and Right Action; (iv) The Pursuit of Happiness; and (v) Justice and the Emotional Labour of Transformation. Our contribution intends to foster reflection on the politics implicit within soma design practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.