Feminist reflexivity and community-engaged design: an autoethnography

In this autoethnography, I describe a community-engaged project where I worked with design students and Dalit adolescent girls in rural areas of India towards co-creating training modules and resource materials on self-expression, agency and autonomy. The focus of this autoethnography is to elucidate productive encounters between feminist thinking and design processes, in relation to notions of positionality and reflexivity in community-engaged design work. To achieve this, I present and analyse four examples of collective reflective practices and their affordances in the context of this project. Following this, I reflect on my position as a Colombian scholar working in the Indian context, situating the analysis away from the dualism of insider/outsider and native/non-native, and instead embracing a more fluid account of my identity and sense of belonging in India, and their effects in facilitating this project. I conclude the autoethnography with comments on the role of reflexivity in becoming a transformative design researcher.