Decolonising Design

Time

16 November, 2016, 1500 – 1630

Location

IDE Group Room West

As part of our ongoing research seminars at the Centre we welcome Prof Dori Tunstall as an international guest speaker.

Her topic Decolonising Design will challenge us to rethink our relationships to design practice and research. Prof Tunstall will also address matters of design anthropology, design for democracy and design for policy.

The talk will be followed by open discussion.

Prof Tunstall has taught at IIT in Chicago, RMIT in Melbourne and now she leads the Design Faculty of OCADU in Toronto. She comes to IDE following her role as a keynote speaker at the ‘Decolonizing Design’ conference in Malmø.

As Manuela Aguirre, a truly dynamic PhD with IDE, has so aptly remarked: ‘This is one of the rare instances where we can discuss values-led design and design and culture, in a critical yet respectful way’.

This event is open to colleagues and graduate students at AHO. Welcome.

Rather than assuming that contemporary power has a singular and necessarily unprecedented form, we need to re-construct the relations among the multiplicity of processes of power, sorting out not just the old and the new, but also, how the old becomes new (rearticulated). And rather than assuming that there is a singular dimension or crisis constituting the line across which resistance is defined, we need to articulate the multiplicity of crises, contradictions, struggles and emergent settlements that organize a complex field of forces. All of this takes us back to the need for new kinds of intellectual and political labour, and new kinds of cooperation and conversation, which embrace multiplicities, not as the other of structure, but as the contingency or openness of the processes and practices of configuration and articulation, and the possibilities of producing other realities, otherwise. (pp. 19-20).

Grossberg, L. (2014). ‘Cultural Studies and Deleuze-Guattari, Part 1. A polemic on projects and possibilities’. Cultural Studies, 28(1): 1-28.

(Image: Big Bang Data exhibition. Photo: Andrew Morrison)