Design, Allyship and Decoloniality
an iteration of the workshop at:
NORDES · 7th Nordic Design Research Conference 15 - 17 June 2017 AHO · Oslo, Norway
The organizers hope participants in these workshops will create a community of redirective practice and take up their own efforts to ally with a pluraversity of design epistomologies, ontologies and research.
The first iteration of these workshops, a conversation exploring decoloniality, photography, design and writing with Teju Cole, occurred November 7, 2016 at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design.
The second iteration, a 3 hour workshop with the attendees of NORDES, is scheduled to occur on Friday June 16, 2017
…colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverse logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it
-Franz Fanon, The Wretched…1961 (as quoted in Walter Mignolo's Delinking)
What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power. One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. Therefore, the model of power that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element of coloniality.
-Anibal Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America
...the fact that certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, thus moving from one pole of the contradiction to the other... Theirs is a fundamental role, and has been throughout the history of this struggle. It happens, however, that as they cease to be exploiters or indifferent spectators or simply the heirs of exploitation and move to the side of the exploited, they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people's ability to think, to want, and to know. Accordingly, these adherents to the people's cause constantly run the risk of falling into a type of generosity as malefic as that of the oppressors. The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.
-Paolo Friere, Pedagogy of the oppressed
there is no modernity without coloniality…coloniality is constitutive, and not derivative, of modernity
-Walter D Mignolo
Recent developments in our current sociopolitical climate have led to entrenched factions around racial and cultural hegemony. We see evidence of this polarity in the design discourse. While some scholars and practitioners are convinced by the imperative to decolonize the discipline, a vigorous opposition remains to the notion of West-centric design as an imperial force. These positions are debated across the discipline – from design practitioners to researchers and scholars alike – occasionally to a contentious or even vitriolic level.
This iteration of the workshop series is a part of the Nordes 2017 DESIGN + POWER programme.
NORDES Conference attendees are invited to register for the workshop. Please consider signing up for them quickly to participate.
The workshop has place for max 25 persons, and lasts 3 hours.
To register please email your name and "Privileged Participation Workshop (Workshop 3)" to Vlad Lyakhov: Vlad.Vyacheslav.Lyakhov@aho.no
Dimeji Onafuwa is a design consultant, researcher and PHD candidate with 15 years experience in professional practice. His research in the field of social design focuses on design’s impact on the costs of contributing to a commons. His most recent consulting work is with a Fortune 500 company on Open Data and the commons.
Jabe is an award-winning international speaker. He is frequently invited to be a keynote speaker and track chair at international conferences, addressing such topics as Failing Well, Management as Design, Learn Like a Scientist and Flow Thinking. His deep practical experience, constant experimentation, and extensive theoretical investigations and readings inform his public speaking and provide a foundational praxis for his active mentorship to a diverse group of colleagues, clients and entrepreneurs.
Jabe is currently pursuing a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University. He lives in Pittsburgh with his partner Molly, their daughter and son; and an lovely grumpy old Jack Russel Terrier.
People of color, women, and gays -- who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before -- are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as "racially charged" even in those cases when it would be more honest to say "racist"; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.
-Teju Cole, The white-savior industrial complex. The Atlantic March, 21 2012
A primary goal of the Privileged Participation workshop is to be inclusive to the largest number of contributors, with the most varied and diverse backgrounds possible. As such, we are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ability, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and religion (or lack thereof). This code of conduct outlines our expectations for all those who participate in our community, as well as the consequences for unacceptable behavior. We invite all those who participate in the Privileged Participation workshop to help us create safe and positive experiences for everyone.
This Code of Conduct is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License
Portions of text dervied from http://citizencodeofconduct.org/
There’s a whole fucking world out there where women and gay men and trans wo/men and racial minorities and the disabled and the overweight and people who are intrinsically and inescapably “different” for any reason are made fun of, marginalized, turned into punchlines. There’s a whole fucking world out there which expects us all to be perfect according to some arbitrary definition and seeks to punish us if we’re not. There’s a whole fucking world out there where people who don’t conform to that standard are not only ridiculed and made to feel not good enough, but can also find themselves at real risk of physical harm. Where they’re denied rights, job opportunities, friendships, votes, equality. If you want to use “politically incorrect” humor that targets those people, you have the entire rest of the bloody world to do it, but you can’t do it here.
--Melissa McEwan