Challenging Extractive Participation

Abstract

This paper re-reads participation through the lens of spatial politics, arguing that spatiality is not a neutral backdrop for relational processes but a contested terrain. This terrain is shaped by power, exclusion, and the situated resistances that emerge within it. We use "resistance"to refer to agonistic practices of imagination - acts that resist erasure, marginalization, and the extractive and solutionist logics that often underpin design interventions. Drawing on decolonial thought and the notion of epistemic extractivism, we examine how Participatory Design, when not critically attuned to these dynamics, risks reproducing centralized models of knowledge production. These conditions are not peripheral to design - they are already there, and they cannot be ignored. They are entangled in place: shaping how entities (human, non-human, less-than- and more-than-human) are confined, erased, or rendered dominant. Participatory Design enters this terrain. It does not operate outside of it. Therefore, we argue for the need to explicitly address the spatial dimension of oppression in Participatory Design practices - to recognize spatiality as a structuring force that defines who may participate, how, and on what terms. We present PDC Places as a curatorial and infrastructural experiment within the Participatory Design Conference 2026, conceived as a decentralized constellation of place-based initiatives, problematizing entangled forms of oppression from their situatedness. A constellation suggests neither hierarchy nor homogeneity. It is a pattern perceived across distance, composed of bodies that maintain their own trajectories. Thinking Places as a constellation resists central-peripheral logics and instead foregrounds relational alignment without subsumption. What connects them is not thematic uniformity, but shared tensions around power, spatiality, and participation. Rather than satellite events, Places were framed as situated ecosystems grounded in local urgencies, networks, and struggles that need to be identified, and understood to envision more just Participatory Design engagements. Through this initiative, we sought to challenge extractive participation - where knowledge is often gathered and mobilized toward innovation within frameworks that ignore or flatten local struggles - and to foreground Place as an ethical and political condition of participation. We argue here that challenging extractive participation requires learning to attune to situated practices already in motion. This paper aims to further articulate a theoretical positioning on spatiality and power in Participatory Design by engaging with the Places presented at the PDC2026 conference, functioning there as distributed enactments of these tensions.