CALL FOR PAPERS: Special Issue for the Journal of Interior Design (JID)

Under the auspices of the Interior Design Educators Council

‘It is not Interior Decoration’: ‘Passing’ and ‘Covering’ Exclusion, and Expanding the Margin of Interiors Discourse

Raymund Königk, Ph.D., University of Lincoln, Guest Editor

Lucinda Kaukas Havenhand, Ph.D., University of North Carolina Greensboro, Guest Editor

Registration of Interest Due (March 1, 2023)
Full Submissions Due (January 1, 2024)
Final Submissions to Publisher (October 2024)
Publication (March 2025)

The sociologist Erving Goffman identified ‘passing’ as the act of denying stigma-carrying attributes of difference, while ‘covering’ is admitting that they exist but down-playing their significance.[1] In his political philosophy, Frantz Fanon argues that actions such as these culminates in the violence of elimination and the violence of assimilation.[2] Shame and embarrassment are central features in these attempts at mitigating identity. As an outsider to other professions, these experiences are familiar to interiors as a field. Our mantra of denial, ‘it is not interior decoration’ as well as our emulation of architecture and social science are inherent but unacknowledged features of the field. Further, the interior is the location where the intimate and personal happens as interiority establishes a lived inner world (distinct from all ‘Others’) – ephemeral places (dependent on fleeting experiences and feelings) are often under-acknowledged and under-valued. This full human experience of being and belonging located in the interior and its creation as well as the complexities of our identity as a field cannot be understood within a narrow focus on ‘academic evidence’ or ‘scientific rigour’. As a result, our current scholarship excludes a multitude of voices on the boundaries it creates by our own attempt to ‘pass’ and ‘cover’.

In this context, the field of interiors contributes to the construction, reconstruction, and maintenance of the status quo. It does this by:

  • Placing emphasis on its similarity to normative professions and de-emphasising its unique practices and perspectives.
  • Stigmatizing and marginalizing some forms of making, knowing, and recording by denying that they exist or matter.
  • Centralizing western aesthetics in a narrow canon of art, architecture, and design in precedent, history, and theory.
  • Designing and constructing places which signal codes of belonging or being unwelcome to the in-group and out-group.
  • Failing to consider and define issues of exclusion, discrimination, and inequality.

Breaking down the boundaries that create marginalization and the acknowledgement and deconstruction of our acts of passing and covering is key to diversity and inclusion in our field.

Donna Haraway, a scientist-philosopher, has suggested that ‘subjugated positions’ have a kind of epistemic privilege which should be preferred because they are open to the interpretive and critical ways of knowing, they can provide more adequate, transformative explanations, and “promise something quite extraordinary”, that is, agency for reconstructing the world without the axes of domination.[3] In Haraway’s terms, our marginal position as a field and the voices and positions that have been silenced and excluded within it or by it become powerful. In a quest for an expansive consideration of diversity, equity, and inclusion in our field and the ‘promise of something quite extraordinary’ this special edition invites comments from those unique and excluded perspectives that question the following:

  • Do we as a field really give a damn about inequality in interiors? Or is our focus on the topic yet another act of legitimization and another act of passing or covering? Why diversity? Why is inclusivity necessary? What would an inclusive attitude to interiors even look like?
  • How does the field of interiors, marginal itself, relegate aspects of itself in the act of passing and covering? What forms of embarrassment does it experience? How does it try to appease the norm? What are the unintended consequences of our trying to establish a discrete identity?
  • How have you experienced exclusion? What are your feelings, stories, and struggles with diversity? Where did you experience this? What role did interiors or the field play in how this happened?
  • How should interiors be decolonized from disciplines which encroach on it? How should it decolonize the knowledge systems on which it relies? Can our marginal position be fully leveraged?
  • How are interiors complicit, sometimes deliberately, in exclusion? Conversely, how do interiors concoct illusions of inclusivity?
  • What are the mechanisms of control in education and practice in the field? How do they feed or starve our ability to be truly equitable and diverse?
  • What are cultural and personal experiences that our field regularly rejects, ignores, or minimizes? How can interiors facilitate them? Can we be legitimate without fully exploring and prioritizing them?

Proposals which push through the boundaries of academic publishing are welcomed. This includes but is not limited to diaries; mood boards, collages, and image boards; visual essays; autoethnographies and reflective practice; drawings; proposals from diverse language communities; expressions of marginalized and stigmatized knowledge; works produced through oral traditions or indigenous knowledge systems; works that have been rejected or stigmatized; or any other form of alternative knowledge production. In this edition, the guest editors will prioritise the centering of new voices and will work closely with contributors to bring new forms of knowledge to the field.

[1] Erving Goffman, Stigma. Notes on the management of spoiled identity. (1963). Simon & Schuster

[2] Frantz Fanon, Black skin, white masks. (1952). Editions du Seuil

[3] Donna Haraway,”Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Fall 1988) p. 583, 585.

DUE DATES FOR SPECIAL ISSUE:

August 2022: Call for papers

March 1, 2023: Registration of Interest –

Registration of Interest – Authors are asked to register their intent to submit a paper by sending a 150-word abstract to Raymund Königk, Guest Editor at rkonigk@lincoln.ac.uk

Please put your surname and “JID Special Issue” in the subject line. Registration of interest is not refereed, nor is it a requirement to submit. However, the acknowledgement of registration facilitates development of a proposal to full research paper by providing confirmation of fit with the special issue. Recognition of fit does not guarantee publication.

January 1, 2024:

Full submissions are due. See author guidelines found on JID’s website at Sage: https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/IDX

March 2025: Publication of JID Special issue

For questions regarding the call for papers, submission deadlines, or anything related to the content of the Special Issue, contact Raymund Königk, at rkonigk@lincoln.ac.uk

Please put your surname and “JID Special Issue” in the subject line.


GUIDELINES FOR JID SUBMISSIONS:

Authors should follow the guidelines found on JID’s website at Sage. Please note the unique guidelines for Articles versus Visual Essays (links are midway down the page). Perspectives and Letters are by invitation only. https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/IDX

Technical questions regarding the submission of documents through the ScholarOne website should be addressed to Kathleen Sullivan, Editorial Assistant (assistant.jid@gmail.com).

The Journal of Interior Design is a scholarly, refereed publication dedicated to a pluralistic exploration of the interior environment. Scholarly inquiry representing the entire spectrum of interior design theory, research, education, and practice is invited. Submissions are encouraged from educators, designers, artists, anthropologists, architects, historians, psychologists, sociologists, or others interested in interior design.