Working on words: Editing Donna Harraway

A one-day workshop with Master students from Aarhus School of Architecture tasked to collectively tasked to edit the dense texts of Donna Harraway’s Staying with The Trouble to make them more accessible for non-experts.

2024

Architects are known to express themselves in sketches, models, and drawings. These tools have been of importance for centuries, but this workshop argues that writing could be used as a tool in a similar way as well. The use of texts can articulate idea creation and is essential in communicating with an audience who knows little about architecture. Although some architects like to write, a lack of practice and skill often makes their writing inconsiderate, unengaging, or unapproachable. Architects tend to lose themselves frequently in jargon and, as such, create an unnecessary distance between the profession and the public.The workshop highlights strategies to avoid these traps and shows what the ingredients of good text are. In this process, the skill of editing is essential. Much like designing, this is not something that can be learned overnight, but some of the key considerations are discussed and put to work.Central to the workshop is an exercise in which an interesting but more challenging-to-approach book is edited—in this case, Staying with the Trouble (2016, Duke University Press) by Donna Haraway, who is known for a difficult-to-access writing style. The workshop practically explores how editing can help in making a text easier to read and understand. Chapters of this book are distributed to different groups. Each student is asked to edit two pages of text to highlight unclear passages, make suggestions, and share concerns about clarity and style. The result is an edited manuscript with tracked changes that is compiled into a revised version of the book.

Stephan Petermann with Alicia Lazzaroni, Carolina Dayer and Ruth Baumeister