Doctor Alison Gill

Alison Gill is a design educator and researcher in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, and the Institute of Culture & Society, at Western Sydney University, Australia. With over 25 years of experience in design education and pedagogy in the Higher Education sector in Australia, she engages with design industry and community partners to enhance student learning and opportunity.

Currently, she teaches in the undergraduate program B.Design (Visual Communication), and supervises postgraduate students working across diverse research methods including practice-led, creative writing, field research and philosophical analysis (Masters, PhDs, and DCAs).

Her PhD, titled 'Wearing Clothes', was completed in 2002 at the University of Sydney and explored intersections in fashion writing, critical theory and philosophies of embodiment.

She is a co-editor and contributor to the book Design/Repair: Place, Practice and Community (2023, Palgrave Macmillan), and her research explores the many roles for design in mediating social relations and practices.

From a co-edited special issue of Journal of Design Research (2015) on social practice theory in the context of design studies and sustainable design, an ongoing co-project developed on community cultures of repair and reuse, featured in Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene (2021), and the collective voices of repair scholars in the edited book Design/Repair (2023).

Her transdisciplinary research focuses on the relationships between design’s socio-material impacts, everyday social practices (like wearing and communication), enacting performative subjectivities, to materialise relationships and diverse socialities in transitions to sustainability in urban contexts. Shifting towards sustainability requires attention to the interdependence and complexity of diverse knowledges, people, and material ways of living.

From an ontological design perspective, Alison’s research seeks transformative pathways, or ways of designing amid the designed world we have now. These are evident in publications about alternative conceptions of consumption and use in everyday practices, including shifting value narratives and initiating community economies; deconstruction & slow fashion; critical rhetoric and audiences in visual communication; sports product advertising and performative athletic subjectivities; and sustainable design education.

On fashion and critical design, she authored “Jacques Derrida: Fashion under erasure” (in Thinking Through Fashion (2016), revised edition forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2025), and “Deconstruction Fashion” (1998; 2007 & 2nd edition 2020 of Fashion Theory: A Reader). Her articles are in Journal of Design Research, Fashion Theory, Cultural Studies Review, Design and Culture, and Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion.