Hello!
It’s been another long while since our last update but we wanted to provide our audience with a recap of our various publications and projects since 2018.
A major collective work that we wanted to promote is the
Decolonization and Design Lesson Plan that we developed for the Bloomsbury Design Library. The plan is designed to help students and instructors familiarise themselves with some concepts and issues relating to decolonization, including ideas for how this can be done via studio practice methods.
Looking back on the plan, and in light of the increasing popularity of discourses relating to decolonization, particularly following events such as the 2020 movement for Black lives uprising, we would emphasise a long running theme of our work: decolonization is not something that can be addressed simply by adding it as a theme to your curriculum or as a concept in your research and design projects.
These can of course be important and valuable steps, but the concept of decolonization is not supposed to fit easily into a university curriculum, let alone in the marketing or PR of design firms. Decolonization is a project of revolutionary social transformation, the kind that aims at upending institutions such as the university, not reforming them. While we do the best that we can to emphasise this point within the deeply compromised context of design education, we try to insist on the fact that the impetus for change in both thinking and action comes from social struggle and movement.
Taking decolonization seriously therefore implies the need to be ‘in but not of’ institutions such as the university, to see the inclusion of decolonial ideas as valuable only to the extent that people understand inclusion is nowhere near sufficient, and to understand that the end goal is not a more politically correct workplace experience but the abolition of things such as workplaces themselves, along with prisons, police, settler-colonial states etc. These are the institutions of colonization that benefit from the watering down of revolutionary ideas.
In addition to the Bloomsbury lesson plan, we have all been involved in producing a number of publications and design projects which have been listed below by year of publication.
2022 and forthcoming:
- Prado de O. Martins, Luiza “Coloniality, Reproduction, and the Climate Crisis, or: How Do We Survive When the Land Is Crumbling under Our Feet?” Interactions 29, no. 1 (January 6, 2022): 99–101. https://doi.org/10.1145/3505687.
- Vieira de Oliveira, P.J.S., Miyazaki, S., forthcoming. Maschinelle-Intelligenz?! Stimm-Bio-Metrie als hörend-bestimmende Medien-Techno-Logie, in: Schürmer, A., Haberer, M., Brautschek, T. (Eds.), ACOUSTIC INTELLIGENCE: hören und gehorchen. Düsseldorf University Press, Düsseldorf.
2021:
- Abdulla, D., 2021. Keep Your Distance, Wear a Mask and Stay Safe: The Visual Language of Covid-19 Print-Based Signage. Visual Resources, 36(3), pp.1–29.
- RADDAR #3 Design Politics, edited by Danah Abdulla
- ‘No ethical design under anti-Blackness’, Matthew Kiem
- Abdulla, D., 2021. Melancholy and a Palestinian Sadness. Journal of Visual Culture, 20(2), pp.160–166.
- Design Struggles: Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives. Eds Claudia Mareis & Nina Paim. Valiz, 2021
- What is needed for change?: Two perspectives on decolonization and the academy, Ahmed Ansari and Matthew Kiem
- Disciplinary Disobedience: A Border Thinking Approach to Design, Danah Abdulla
- There are words and worlds that are truthful and true, Luiza Prado de O. Martins
- Emotional Labor, support, structures, and the walls in between – A conversation with the Decolonizing Design Group
- Vieira de Oliveira, P.J.S., 2021. “…the table was set, and we were never dead”: On the Persistence of Colonial Listening in Germany. The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory 2, 89–101.
- Vieira de Oliveira, P.J.S., 2021. To Become Undone. DING Magazine 70–75.
- Schultz, T., Sheehan, N., 2021. “Articulatory, Respectful Service Design.” ServDes.2020 Keynote, Melbourne
- Against Performative Positivity, Futuress, Danah Abdulla
- Canlı, E., (2021). Lachen bringt Tränen. Missy Magazine 3(June-July), pp.56-59
- Canlı, E. (2021). Designing with/against Cherophobia. Futuress Magazine. July 1, 2021.
2020:
- Prado de O. Martins, Luiza. “The Humboldt Cup: On Narrative, Taxonomies, and Colonial Violence.” Interactions 28, no. 1 (December 23, 2020): 90–92.
- Abdulla, D., 2020. Imagining Otherwise. In: M. Smith, ed. Decolonizing: The Curriculum, the Museum, and the Mind, Research as Praxis. Vilnius, Lithuania: Vilnius Academy of Arts Press.
- Vieira de Oliveira, P.J.S., 2020. Dealing with Disaster: Notes towards a decolonizing, aesthetico-relational sound art, in: Groth, S.K., Schulze, H. (Eds.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art. Bloomsbury Academic, New York, pp. 71–88.
- Vieira de Oliveira, P.J.S., 2020. The earview as a border epistemology: an analytical and pedagogical proposition for design, in: Bull, M. Cobussen, M. (Eds.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies. Bloomsbury Academic, New York.
- Vieira de Oliveira, P.J.S., 2020. Forbidden Music, Forbidden Jukeboxes: Listening Anxieties and the Hyper-amplification of Violence in Rio de Janeiro. Border-Listening/Escucha-Liminal, Radical Sounds Latin America 1, 21–33.
- Keshavarz, M. Khosravi, S., 2020 “The Magic of Borders”, e-flux
- Keshavarz, M. 2020 “Border Hospitality”, Discover Society
- Keshavarz, M. 2020 “Reconfiguring the Border” Avery Shorts, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.
- Keshavarz, M. 2020. “Violent Compassions: Humanitarian Design and the Politics of Borders”, Design Issues, vol. 36 (4): 20-32.
- Keshavarz, M. 2020 “Vulnerable Critical Makings: Migrant Smuggling by Boats and Border Transgression” in Traganou, J. (ed.) Design and Political Dissent: Spaces, Visuals, Materialities, London: Routledge
- Keshavarz, M. 2020 “Citizenship” in Tassinari and E. Staszowski (eds.) Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon, London: Bloomsbury.
- Keshavarz, M. & Björgvinsson, E. 2020 “Partitioning Vulnerabilities: On the Paradoxes of Participatory Design in the City of Malmö” in A.M. Dankus, M. Hyvönen and M. Karlssson (eds.) Vulnerable Encounters through Art and Media in Scandinavia. Palgrave McMillan. 247-265
- Canlı, E., 2020. “Prison Heterocissexual Complex: Sociospatial Politics of Queer Incarceration and the Case of Turkey” in: Davy, Z. et al. (Eds.), The Handbook of Global Sexualities, SAGE, London, pp. 313-333
- Canlı, E., 2020. “Design’s Performative Agency: Thoughts and New Directions for Materiality, Ontology and Identity-Making.” in Potvin, J., Marchand, M., Design and Agency: Critical Perspective on Identities, Histories and Practices, Bloomsbury, London and New York, pp. 287-299.
2019:
- Keshavarz, M 2019. The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent, London: Bloomsbury
- Keshavarz, M. 2019 “Sketch for a Theory of Design Politics” in M. Meissen & Z. Ritts (eds.) Para-Platforms: On the Spatial Politics of the Right-Wing Populism, Berlin: Sternberg Press.
- Keshavarz, M. & Zetterlund, C, 2019 “The Politics of Borders in the Emergence of Modern Swedish Craft”, Journal of Modern Craft. Vol.12 (1)
- Keshavarz, M. & Parsa, A. 2019 “Targeted by Persuasion: Military Uniform and the Legal Matter of Killing in War”, Law Text Culture, vol. 23: 223-239
- What Does It Mean to Decolonize Design?, Eye on Design. Featuring Danah Abdulla
- ‘A Manifesto for Decolonising Design’, with Danah Abdulla, Ahmed Ansari, Ece Canlı, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Matthew Kiem, Luiza Prado de O. Martins & Pedro J.S. Vieira de Oliveira, Tristan Schultz, Journal of Futures Studies, March 2019, 23(3): 129–132
- A Platform For Third World Solidarity: The Popular Front For The Liberation Of Palestine Bulletin, The Funambulist, February 28, 2019, Danah Abdulla
- Vieira de Oliveira, P.J.S., 2019. Weaponizing Quietness: Sound Bombs and the Racialization of Noise. Design and Culture 11, 193–211.
- Prado de O. Martins, Luiza. “The Decolonial Cyborg and the Bauhaus Automaton: A Play.” In Bauhaus Futures, edited by Laura Forlano, Molly Wright Steenson, and Mike Ananny, Illustrated edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2019.
2018:
- Schultz, T. 2018. “Mapping Indigenous Futures: Decolonising Techno-Colonising Designs.” Strategic Design Research Journal 11 (August): 79–91. doi:10.4013/sdrj.2018.112.04.http://revistas.unisinos.br/index.php/sdrj/article/view/sdrj.2018.112.04
- Keshavarz, M. & Snodgrass, E. 2018 “Orientations of Europe: Boats, the Mediterranean Sea and the Materialities of Contemporary Mobility Regimes”, Borderlands e-Journal. Vol. 17
- Canli, Ece, and Luiza Prado de O. Martins. “Design and Intersectionality: Material Production of Gender, Race, Class – And Beyond.” In Sense et Sensibility, edited by Pernilla Ellens. Onomatopee, 2018.
- Canlı, E. 2018. “Binary by Design: Unfolding Corporeal Segregation at the Intersection of Gender, Identity and Materiality.” The Design Journal 21(5): pp. 651-669. DOI: 10.1080/14606925.2018.1491716