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RESEARCH
My main research area is critical creative research.Being an “independent” scholar means that while I earned a doctoral degree in 2021 from Monash University (Melbourne), I continue to do research, write, publish, and run projects without affiliation or salary from an academic institution. I tap the industry of academic research to stay linked to the lineages my work comes from, to be in conversation with fellow design researchers, and to join others in keeping traditional and anti-institutional schools of thought circulating with one another.
Below are the areas of inquiry I am a part of and contribute to:
- Design research
- Reflexivity
- Materiality
- Embodiment
- Interiority
- Practice-led research
- Critical autoethnography
- Critical citation practice
- Black critical thought
- Creative contexts to investigate how artists and designers engage with contemporary socio-political conditions
- Developing methodologies and reflexive methods to explore relationships between knowing and making
- Critical theories, studies, and practices
PUBLICATIONS
Title
PUBLISHER
AUTHORS
YEAR
Chapter 3.3: The Politics of Participation in Service Design: Preparation, Emergence, and Refusals
Handbook of Service Design: Plural Perspectives and a Critical Contemporary Agenda, Penin, L., Prendiville, A., & Sangiorgi, D. (eds),
Bloomsbury Publishing
Bloomsbury Publishing
Agid, S., Trischler, J., & Diatta M. D.
2025
Chapter 10: Turning the Body Inside Out: Model-Making, Critical Theory, and Self-Accountability
Diatta, M. D.
2024
Undisciplining Who We Bring to the Academic Table: Practical Tactics to Accompany Critical Creative Inquiry
Diatta, M. D.
2023
A Family of Sensibilities: Toward a Relational Design Practice Grounded in Materiality and Embodiment
Diatta, M. D., Goncalves, R. D., & Grocott, L. H.
2022
A Place to Meet: How Critical Theory Cares for the Everyday in Artistic Practice
Cluster for Critical Artistic Research (CCARe), Research in Arts and Education, 304–326
https://doi.org/10.54916/rae.119529
https://doi.org/10.54916/rae.119529
Diatta, M. D., Jones, S. H., McEntee, K.
2021
Diatta, M. D., & Gonçalves, R. D.
2020
Our Everyday Forms: Archiving objects of resistance at home
Nordic Design Research Society Conference, Aalto University,
Espoo, Finland
Diatta, M. D.
2019
Material Communications: A strategy applied in clinical family therapy and design
Intellect Books, JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students, Volume 1, Issue 1, 63-76
https://doi.org/10.1386/jaws.1.1.63_1
https://doi.org/10.1386/jaws.1.1.63_1
Diatta, M. D.
2015
* Please do not hesitate to email me for access to my articles to bypass the academic paywalls.