Approaches

Postnormal social research recognizes uncertainty, complexity, contested values, high stakes, and urgency as conditions of lived experience and social inquiry.

The approach builds on a lineage of postnormal thought beginning with Funtowicz and Ravetz’s post-normal science, which challenged assumptions of certainty, objectivity, and singular expert authority, expanding what counts as legitimate knowledge through extended peer communities and the inclusion of local and lived expertise.

These conditions extend well beyond science. Sardar’s postnormal times describes contemporary social, cultural, political, technological, economic, and environmental life through complexity, chaos, and contradiction. Mayo and Miah’s postnormal condition further examines what happens when inherited categories, disciplines, and ways of knowing remain in place even as the realities they were designed to explain have changed.

Postnormal social research brings this lineage into social inquiry. It recognizes postnormal dynamics, values lived experience as expertise, and seeks transformative ways of being, knowing, and doing. Rather than treating uncertainty and instability as problems to eliminate, postnormal social research works within them—remaining open to plural knowledge, changing conditions, alternative possibilities, and otherwise ways of becoming.

Critical Design Practice uses design to question what exists. Through speculation, what-if scenarios, worldbuilding, futures, and material experimentation, it socializes ideas making alternative possibilities present, tangible, and accessible.

Dunne and Raby describe speculation as a means of “unsettling the present,” using counterfactual what-if questions and possible futures to loosen the constraints of what is already known, established, or considered realistic. Design becomes a form of inquiry: a way to think through making and to give form to possibilities that do not yet exist.

Within this practice, I coined and developed Data-Driven Speculation, a transdisciplinary method connecting data, imagination, and futures. The method begins with analysis but refuses to treat findings as an endpoint. Signals identified in results or findings become generative inputs, moving analysis beyond description and explanation toward radical imagination. In this process, analytical endings become speculative beginnings. The method originated in my emergent Queering Futures Framework, where signals from quantitative and qualitative research were carried into a practice-based mode explicitly designed to integrate data, imagination, and futures.

Liberatory Tech builds flexible, values-infused ethical systems designed to lift and care rather than extract or control. It prioritizes transparency, consent, data sovereignty, collective agency, open source, and open science.

Systems encode choices about intent, access, participation, privacy, and control. Developing technology therefore involves intentionality and responsibility for the choices embedded within it. While Coraline Ada Ehmke, software engineer and tech ethicist, describes liberatory technology as technology that is “free from the coercive incentives of centralized tech,” I, Jess Westbrook, a type 1 diabetic tethered to an insulin pump, regard liberatory tech as life-sustaining systems free of deception, dark patterns, exploitation, and severe profit motives—systems that enable a full life so I can contribute, share, and love.

This work is both aspirational and practical. It may originate in speculation—imagining technologies, infrastructures, and relationships that do not yet exist—or emerge from a real, identified need in the present.

Becoming Otherwise is the practice of actualizing possibilities already present within complex diverse lived realities. It escapes norms, normals, and normative frictions and makes real otherwise ways of being, knowing, relating, and doing.

Otherwise is more than an alternative. Across philosophy, critical theory, and applied practice, it operates as an ethical orientation, a latent possibility, a lived reality, and a practice. It begins with responsibility and care and recognizes that existing arrangements already contain possibilities for becoming otherwise.

Otherwise is lived, plural, and relational. It describes ways of knowing, being, relating, and reckoning that assert existence, dignity, and liberation within, against, beyond, or despite dominant arrangements. Becoming Otherwise puts these possibilities into practice. Whether individual or collective, immediate or unfolding over time, otherwise becomes real through lived experience.