People
Queer/ing values people. It centers embodied, situated, intersectional, and relational lived experience as expertise, grounded in self-awareness and self-determination. This commitment is about human agency and power.
About
Bold ideas, transformation, and serious fun.
QUEER/ING COMMITMENTS
Light
Queer/ing brings light, broadly interpreted. It resists reduction, essentialism, fixed categories, optimization, and imposed best practices, inviting new ways of seeing, feeling, and knowing. This commitment is about clarity and transformation.
Action
Queer/ing takes action, from quiet introspection and practices of care to collective action and tactical disruption. Radical imagination and counterfactual what-if possibilities become ways to design something else, something otherwise. This commitment is about making things happen.
Otherwise
Otherwise is ethical orientation, latent possibility, lived reality, and practice. Possibilities for becoming otherwise are already present within existing arrangements; Queer/ing works to recognize, inhabit, and actualize them through responsibility, care, and lived experience.
FOUNDER / DIRECTOR
Jess Parris Westbrook
THEY/THEM/THEIRS, T1D, MFA, PHD
POSITIONALITY
My positionality moves from the physiological to the psychological and social. It involves my intersecting personal contexts, my disabled body, my Queer mind, and my creative ways. These elements shape my biases, preferences, perceptions, tendencies, insider/outsider relationships, advantages, and disadvantages. While described in pieces, they are impossibly (and fantastically) intertwined.
PHILOSOPHY
My research philosophy reflects the interplay of ontology (what I believe about being/reality) and epistemology (how I relate to knowledge).
My ontology aligns with complexity. Complexity theory, with its roots in systems theory, cybernetics, catastrophe theory, and chaos theory, offers a way of thinking that resists the binary, linear, deterministic, and reductionist logic of the 20th-century Western worldview. Complexity is, as Davis and Sumara write, “incompressible and ever-expanding” (2006, p. 34). It cannot be reduced to parts or fully predicted. Complexity keeps me curious, agile, and attracted to emergence and uncertainty.
My epistemology aligns with transdisciplinarity. I resist disciplinary silos, prefer inquiry over specialization, and view standards as cultural artifacts that can be stretched, subverted, or reimagined. Transdisciplinarity supports borrowing, invention, and the integration of formal and informal knowledge. It is a “21st-century research attitude” (Davis & Sumara, 2008, p. 35) that merges “transgression with problem-solving” (Bernstein, 2015, p. 11). Transdisciplinarity keeps me curious, agile, and attracted to emergent ideas, surprise, and uncertainty.
ON TEACHING
“How does design translate the value of caring into tangible social experiences?” — Dori Tunstall, PhD
I am context-aware. I design and engage in experiences for and with the people and needs involved. Every direction, curriculum decision, course description, learning goal, and program outcome—every meeting and interaction—is an opportunity to welcome surprise, examine friction, explore purpose, invent process, and translate the value of caring into tangible social experiences.