Sonisa Noun
Systemic design offers powerful tools for mapping complexity across services, policies, and institutions, yet these tools remain rooted in Western, institutional, language-based research traditions that can struggle to account for trauma, embodied knowledge, and postcolonial conditions. Building on critical systems traditions of boundary critique and recent decolonial systemic design scholarship, this paper argues that conventional mapping can assume a neutral, external vantage point, obscuring colonial histories and reproducing hierarchies of knowledge. Drawing on postcolonial theory and existing research on Cambodia, it identifies a critical blind spot: when systemic design relies exclusively on abstract, text-based maps, it risks reproducing knowledge hierarchies that obscure or inadequately address gender-based violence (GBV), particularly where harm is entangled with silence, embodiment, and culturally situated interpretations. To address this, the paper presents a methodological hypothesis. It proposes arts-based multimodal inquiry, combining body-map storytelling (Gastaldo et al., 2012), smaller-format spatial and relational drawings, and collective interpretation, as a participant-authored complement to conventional system maps. Such mapped stories could connect embodied experience with relationships, places, and institutions from the inside-out, treating participants as authors of systemic representations rather than merely as sources of data. The paper situates this contribution within recent RSD and Contexts scholarship on counter-mapping, system traps, and systemic entanglement (Ahmed et al., 2025; Udoewa, 2023, 2024; Bagchi, 2022). Situating the hypothesis in the long aftermath of the Khmer Rouge and culturally specific constructions of harm and blame (Eisenbruch, 2018), the paper argues that design research must be accountable to local historical conditions rather than importing universal frameworks of systems change. A researcher-side visual clustering process and a reflexive family vignette situate the proposal’s development, foregrounding authorship, circulation, positionality, and epistemic justice. No participant data are reported, and no empirical validation is claimed. A future protocol is specified to compare arts-based and text-based maps under participant review while documenting refusal, disagreement, and emotional burden. The contribution is a testable proposition: participant-authored multimodal inquiry may make embodied experience, system boundaries, and interpretive authority more available for collective scrutiny without treating visual artefacts as transparent representations of a system.
Keywords: systemic design, gender-based violence, arts-based research, decolonial methodologies, epistemic justice, Cambodia