I Wrote an Aspirational Abstract; A Fabstract

Writing a 1-pager for a 100 page dissertation… 12 months ahead

My PhD journey is planned out to be 3 years long. I just hit the 2 year mark. And that point in time gets marked with a formal milestone review, where two panelists (in my case, Shanti Sumartojo and Brian Martin) in the research community at Monash University are invited to review and give feedback on the work. Since taking what they each had to say about my work, it dawned on me I only have 6 months until I hit another milestone and until I present my updated work to Shanti and Brian again, for the final time.

I had so many faint impressions of how to tie my work together, and landed on this idea:

What if I wrote a “Fabstract”?

— like, a Fake, Future, wanna-be-Fabulous abstract. Yes, I totally made it up.

What is a Fabstract?

It is the abstract of my own work that I want to read when I’m done. It’s a speculative, 1-page writing exercise that acts as one tangible possibility to work towards, commit to, and to contain my research as I head towards the final milestone. (Shared below).

💆🏽 Speculative and Aspirational
I told myself this 1-pager is living in “a distant place near you.” And that after it’s written, everything done and written in the next 6 months will work to back up the claims I made in this Fabstract. And the intent is, in 2 months, 4 months, 5.9 months, I will be closer and closer to making real a version of this very abstract.

🤙🏽 There and Not There
30% of the statements in my Fabstract are backed by absolutely nothing (yet) and completely aspirational, as the (self-imposed) exercise requires. Other statements are backed by writing I already have or solid drafts of ideas that I’ve shared and haven’t shared yet.

🐙 The Process is Wobbly
Starting with a new page and writing the first sentence of the Fabstract felt relieving. It was a mix of (a) pasting in sentences I had written before, (b) sentences and phrases I put together for the first time to name what I want the research to say and do, and (c) some sentences that I wasn’t sure I believed in or wanted, but left there until I was close to finalizing the Fabstract so I can step back see how it flows within the whole page (As in, the abstract. As in, the vision of the overall research project). Letting those three or more types of sentences sit side by side and exist at the same time felt great.

☔️ Suspending Your Disbelief (in Yourself)
Writing my Fabstract meant temporarily (or not) choosing to refuse the ideas that you need to be an infinitely all-Knowing, caught up, expert scholar in order write anything ever. Or let alone perform those things. It’s refusing the kind of logic that says vernacular, lower-case “t” truths aren’t enough, and therefore you are an inadequate amateur. It was about suspending those kinds of beliefs and leaning into the idea that what I know and things I have hunches about are worth choosing to act on — in speculative writing.

🌅 The Horizon to Work Towards
Once it’s written, I’ve used it as a physical, practical marker to work towards. As in, taking a sentence from the abstract that is backed by absolutely nothing (yet) and doing the thinking, doing, chatting, reading, drafting to turn that sentence into a paragraph or even a chapter that is absolutely backed by many somethings.

💀 It Will Disintegrate
And it is made to change. The page of the Fabstract acts like a container with boundaries marking the healthy, limited scope of the work from here on out. Because at this post-Mid-Candidature point, I absolutely want to avoid suddenly running out of time or “exploring” “possibilities” for too long. Sentences or a paragraph or two might disintegrate, but that same healthy, limited scope hopefully will remain and be stable. It acts like the kind of plan you make—not for it to pan out perfectly—but to have one in place in order to rework it (i.e. every plan, ever).

What’s a (PhD) abstract?

I had to look it up. An abstract for a dissertation (the big piece of writing you do towards the end of a PhD, and submit) is different from an abstract to an article or paper, and its different from a summary. Very generally speaking, it’s not meant to even mention the ‘things you did’ as part of the project. It should read as ‘what you “discovered.”’

The audience is your examiners.
It should answer, ‘Why should the reader (i.e. examiner) care?’ ‘What have I done that matters?’ ‘What is the gap I’m addressing?’ ‘How does this discipline change?’

The contribution
For me, thinking about it as if it would be read as the back cover of a book jacket of a book sitting on the shelves at Bluestockings bookstore where I used to spend time after work in New York was compelling.

My Fabstract

(Warning: Outdated! From August 18, 2020)

This PhD research introduces double consciousness as a way of knowing into design research. W.E.B. Dubois’ 1897 conception of Black American double consciousness is a state of being that is derived from living in Blackness. This doubling is due to a particular kind of chronic, heightened self-awareness necessary to survive whiteness. The work produced in this research is exclusively by, for and about design researchers who operate through this embodied lens. The scholarship of Alice Walker, Gloria Anzaldúa and Robin M. Boylorn’s notions of double and multiple consciousnesses build on Dubois’ concept through their lived experiences. The theorizing of each of these scholars emerges due to the specific conditions created through dominating structures and geopolitical lugares (places). I assert that this matters for fellow design researchers who navigate the world and their design work through their own multiple consciousnesses — explicitly or implicitly. This research engages with this and other particular kinds of epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies that are by definition inextricable from systems of oppression and our lived experiences in them.

In the scope of my own design practice, I disrupt the normative, western logic through which I have practiced Design and settle into these kinds of embodied and theoretical concerns. This is an ongoing, long term process of undoing and remaking that happens in relation with several fields and disciplines — this research builds on scholarship at the intersection of Black Studies and Native Studies, and Queer Theory and Disability Studies. This work contributes to cross- and transdisciplinarity in Design. Transdisciplinary Design is reimagined not as a permeating, fluid practice made up of collaboration, systems orientations and cross-cutting interventions but as a practice that begins and ends with its ‘between’ state. I repurpose the distinct position of being between disciplines, between ideologies, between places to reflect Design onto itself. The contribution made in Transdisciplinary Design through this PhD research is not about diversifying the theorizing with which it engages or the fields it works across. Instead, a breadth of components of my transdisciplinary process is exposed to demonstrate critical reflexivity as the central purpose of its practice. Showing Design to itself through its relations across these disciplines means embodying a still, reflexive between-state as an ethical position. This stillness has its own temporalities and quiet movements, geographies, and atmosphere.

I use geographies as metaphor, as methodology, as a set of ethics for unknowing dominating, white, western logic which I have internalized. I conceptualize this fragmented geography as a space where my own Black- Asian- Senegalese- Diola- Japanese- Queer- non-white settler/immigrant selves — including my multiple consciousness — can possibly be held. It is a place and methodology that it is simultaneously fragmented, multiple, layered, fluid, immaterial and formed by the incoherence constituted by dominating systems and logic. Through an investigation of my own design research processes, I remake the concerns and responsibilities of a designer across a spectrum of sites: cross-pollinating among their communities, engaging with others’ ideas, working with people through design, and listening to their physical body. By investigating these sites within a designer’s practice, I identify what it takes — a set of ethics — to remake the relations with the field of Design and design researchers like myself.

I’m sharing it with my supervisors and critical friends now, for their thoughts. I’m proud and excited that something like this is what my PhD work is becoming.