Valentina Ferreri

Queering from Within: Notes from a Self-Reflexive Ph.D. Journey

This contribution is a self-reflexive journey into queering design research from within academic, institutional, and urban contexts. Emerging from my PhD research, titled “Queer Cities. Queering Participatory Design of Spatial Urban Practices”, it unfolds as an embodied and autoethnographic journey through the joys, struggles, contradictions, hopes, and resistances encountered while attempting to embed queer thought and practice as transformative, messy, and generative critical lenses within participatory design. Through the framework developed in the research, "ALLA ROVESCIA" (THE OTHER WAY AROUND), I explore how queer(ing) can unsettle normative and dominant paradigms in design research/practice by engaging with concepts such as queer temporalities, (in)visibility, care, conflictualities, futurity, joy, and (un)worlding as powerful guiding concepts of resistance and potentialities. The paper reflects on the tensions of inhabiting queerness as both a critical position and a lived condition within academic and institutional spaces, proposing queering design inquiry as a hopeful, critical, and situated act.