Feminist Organizational Placemaking: The Relational Ontology of Place and Feminist Care

Abstract

This essay explores a tension around the potential for placemaking in organizations to be a feminist practice. On one hand, places promote authenticity, security, humanity, and community—all practices in line with a feminist ethic of care. On the other hand, places can reproduce gendered norms and mandate emotional labor. Part of the reason that the making of place cannot be unequivocally positive in organizations is that, when viewed from a relational approach to space and organizational communication, places are formed through the coming together of many trajectories, including discourses and ideologies of work. This tension is not easily resolved and demonstrates that place in organizations is necessarily political because it exists in relation with already political and gendered patterns. For this reason, placemaking has the potential to humanize and transform organizations, but it can also reify existing power and gender dynamics.

Keywords:

• Care
• feminism
• organizational communication
• place
• placemaking