Setting the Killjoy Table: Youth Co-Design as Affective Practice

Abstract

This Situated Action stages a youth co-design experiment in which a table is not only built as an object, but also set as a site for reckoning with conflicting affects, and marginalized forms of labour and knowledge. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's reflections on kitchen tables as infrastructures of feminist publishing and mutual support, the Killjoy Table translates critical feminist theory into an embodied, collaborative design protocol with young people in Limerick, Ireland. The project asks how a seemingly modest act—constructing and using a table together under material and institutional constraints—can become a way of practising dialogue, coexistence, and peace across generational divides. Young people who are usually positioned as "consulted stakeholders" or research subjects are here invited as co-designers and knowledge-holders. Their everyday encounters with "brick walls" (rules, spatial decisions, bureaucratic procedures) are taken as starting points rather than background context: it is their irritation, boredom, exhaustion, and refusal that set the terms of the design brief. The Killjoy Table thus treats frustration not as a problem to be smoothed out by participatory techniques, but as a resource for collective imagination and critique.