Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Graphic Design
First Advisor
Kelsey Elder
Second Advisor
Anther Kiley
Third Advisor
Elizabeth Goodspeed
Abstract
Graphic designers are often obsessed with a broader public. The desire to be seen, to be heard, to have our work reach the broadest audience possible—these are goals deeply ingrained in our discipline. But why? Just Between Us (and everyone we tell…) challenges us to abandon this fixation, proposing instead that graphic design should concern itself with the private—the intimate, the local, the unseen.
This is where gossip comes in. Gossip is the language of the invisible, a form of sharing, and a means of knowledge-production and preservation that has historically been dismissed as frivolous, immoral, and—most egregious of all—associated with women. Gossip networks offer a model of connectivity, of relationality. Before the internet, before mass media, before centralized knowledge institutions, gossip was how people understood the world around them. It was how we knew what plants were safe to eat, who could be trusted, what dangers lurked in the shadows. It was how marginalized people, in particular, shared wisdom, organized, and built networks of care.
My work has always been defined by the understanding that everything that I am exists in relation to others. It takes an audience to activate an artwork, it takes a community to activate its own values, it takes many, many people working collaboratively to create new knowledge. When we think of knowledge production in academic spaces we often think about scientifically researched methods with peer reviews by other qualified professors and researchers. But gossip is knowledge that is created from the co-authorship of feminized spaces, ‘peer reviewed’ by those in our communities, passed down information, critical thinking as a group space, a form of knowledge production absent from the rules and dictations of capitalism. This is what this body of work aims to understand: How do we create space for the more informal methods of knowledge production, and how do we use gossip as a methodology for that making?
Recommended Citation
Khodanovich, Deborah, "Just Between Us (and everyone we tell...)" (2026). Masters Theses. 1643.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1643
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
Community-Based Research Commons, Graphic Design Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons