The regimes of Whiteness, heteronormativity, androcentrism, able-bodiedness or Eurocentrism have for a long time constituted the frameworks of ‘proper’, ‘successful’ or expected social conduct, organising in a normative way social communication, relations and spaces. The regimes have been shaping social life, state policies and institutions, or fields of science and arts. Social practices are imbued with preconceptions concerning race, sexuality, gender, health or ethnicity which have become so commonsensical that it takes a lot of critical effort to go beyond the normative context.
Different academic and artistic disciplines have crafted their own spaces, often very exclusionary ones, designing their own landscapes of (post)modernity upon normative premises. In today’s world, however, it is difficult to keep this modern, positivist fantasy of equal but separate spaces of knowledge production. Researching and interpreting events and processes through a discipline- bound lenses is unlikely to produce any major social or cultural breakthrough. Interdisciplinarity and cross-pollination are emerging as productive research tools, and a change in perspective can build up a new landscape to explore.
No doubt, in the fields we work in, there are ‘inaudible’ voices, ‘invisible’ positionalities, minor perspectives or overlooked landscapes. For example, the conferences of Polish design studies are dominated by white, male speakers whereas for over a decade it has been women who have made up the majority of design studies students. Let us then take a critical look at fields of knowledge production we work within to see what kinds of voices have been difficult or impossible to hear so far.
We invite anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, linguists, business and management scholars, designers, as well as academics working in other areas, or activists, to share their observations. Both academics and activists are keen observers of social, cultural and political realities, and they all have been tracking, researching, or struggling with ‘invisible’ mechanisms of power that influence everyday life, maintain normative power relations and uphold prejudices, exclusions and inequalities.
We invite presentations that engage with the following or similar topics:
•the promise of horizontal networks,
•diversity management in organisations,
•intercultural communication and teamwork management,
•towards inclusive innovation systems,
•excluded groups in modern society,
•UX research for inclusion,
•desiging social/ intercultural/ business communication,
•discursive production of irrelevance in public process of communication,
•new architecture of visibility and invisibility created by social media,
•invisibility of female designers,
•gender of/in design,
•accessible UX (1% matters, too),
•invisibility of indigenous knowledge systems,
•invisible work; systems that reproduce disadvantage for workers,
•challenging/strenghtening power structures via technology,
•invisible social identities,
•processes of silencing and invisibilizing different social group,
•invisible problems and issues that are kept from the agenda.

The conference is co-financed by the European Social Fund under the Operational Program Knowledge Education Development, non-competitive project “Enhancing the competences of academic staff and the institution’s potential in receiving people from abroad - Welcome to Poland” implemented as part of 3.3 POWER defined in the application for project co-financing No. POWR.03.03.00-00-PN14 / 18.