Towards Positional Citizenship
designing for the More-than-Human Political
Vanessa Monna (TU Delft - Industrial Design Engineering)
Abhigyan Singh (TU Delft - Industrial Design Engineering)
Natalia Romero Herrera (TU Delft - Industrial Design Engineering)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
“We have never been modern” wrote Bruno Latour, proposing that the dualism between nature and society has represented a convenient fiction. If humans have never genuinely stood apart, what happens to one of its most anthropocentric fabrications, citizenship? Conventionally a marker of political agency, citizenship determines who can speak, act, and belong. This conceptualisation excludes the multiple more-than-human agents shaping collective experiences. Building upon Plessner’s concept of positionality, the paper introduces “Positional Citizenship” to transcend the Cartesian divide between humans and more-than-humans, reshaping the political as a relational space of co-presence. Building on this shift, design becomes a practice of relational reconfiguration, making these distributed agencies visible and actionable. This paper outlines mechanisms facilitating this transformation: unlearning Western ontologies of mastery; integrating indigenous epistemologies of interdependence; recognising non-human entities as agents; cultivating material ethics and care; translating institutional and infrastructural assemblages; and working within interstitial ecologies where hybrid forms emerge.
help_outline