Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Existentially Guilty: Where Do I Go From Here?, Devontae Wilson

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Teachers, students, parents, and even politicians have been forced to confront the by-products of not having difficult conversations about race and class. Political pundits are using this moment in history sparked by recorded injustice and the publicized murders of unarmed black people at the hands of law enforcement to demonize Critical Race Theory (CRT), a framework created to analyze how the law is racialized. This portfolio is largely a result of Dr. Rudine Sims-Bishop’s “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” and contextualizing it through my personal experience as a classroom teacher, as a black man in a majority white, female …

The Historical Role Of Leviticus 25 In Naturalizing Anti-Black Racism, James Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

Leviticus 25:39–46 describes a two-tier model of slavery that distinguishes Israelites from foreign slaves. It requires that Israelites be indentured only temporarily while foreigners can be enslaved as chattel (permanent property). This model resembles the distinction between White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves in the American colonies. However, the biblical influence on these early modern practices has been obscured by the rarity of citations of Lev. 25:39–46 in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources about slavery. This article reviews the history of slavery from ancient Middle Eastern antiquity through the seventeenth century to show the unique degree to which early modern …

The People Of The Pla 2.0, Roy Kamphausen Mr.

Books, Monographs & Collaborative Studies

The 27th annual People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Conference—“The People in the PLA” 2.0—revisited a theme first explored at the 2006 conference but understudied since. This volume examines how the structure, education, training, and recruitment of PLA personnel have changed in the last decade and in the Xi Jinping era.

Structural changes in the PLA have centered around two poles: improving the warfighting readiness of the PLA and strengthening Communist Party of China (CPC) control of the PLA. Reforms to the political work system, the evolution of the Second Artillery into the Rocket Force, and expansion of the PLA’s foreign-based force …

Pivot 2021 Editorial Dismantling/ Reassembling Tools For Alternative Futures, Renata Marques Leitão, Jananda Lima, Tieni Meninato

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

The Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group of the Design Research Society (DRS) and the Public Visualization Lab of OCAD University invited designers, scholars, artists, and changemakers for two days of intercultural conversations about decoloniality and societal transformation. Pivot 2021 aimed to identify tools and practices of dismantling and reassembling that could favour ways of reshaping human presence on Earth and concrete cases of alternative future-making from all around the world.

Fem DiàLeg: Feminist Participatory Thinking Space, Gabriela Masfarré Pintó, Mercè Rua Fargues

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Fem Dilàleg, which means ‘we dialogue’ in Catalan, is an initiative that started in 2019 and aims to develop the territory of dialogue as a design space and social practice, contributing to the dialogic learning practice present in many cultural traditions. Fem Diàleg’s proposition is to articulate the question of knowledge-creation praxis by triangulating: the feminist epistemologies of situated knowledge, art as a relational practice and dialogue as a shared and embodied reflexivity. Since its inception in 2019 Fem Diàleg has organized nine gatherings with over 250 participants and more than 22 invited artists and guests. In this short paper …

Design Fuel For The Neoliberal Fire, Becky Nasadowski

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

University graphic design education and professional design organizations in the United States have generally avoided critical conversations regarding the field’s emphasis on professionalization and entrepreneurialism. In this paper, I will discuss two related neoliberal nodes that have persisted and particularly intensified over the past decade: one, design’s insistence on the social as a marketable passion project that escapes history and socio-political relations, and two, design’s fixation on an entrepreneurial mindset that subsumes all leisure time into labor time. I will articulate the ways design education and professional design organizations in the United States have been ideologically complicit in these efforts …

Biodiversity Logbooks For An Environmental Pedagogy Of Care, Serena Pollastri, Liz Edwards

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Over the past century, botanists and educators have observed a sharp decrease in people’s ability to notice and identify plants in their environment, especially among urban populations in the West. This phenomenon has often been referred to as “Plant Blindness” or “Plant Awareness Disparity”, and is caused by a combination of factors - some of which are related to reduced opportunities for engagement with nature and the increase in the use of digital technology. As progressive disconnection from the environment starts from an early age, early years and primary education play a crucial role in determining people’s connection or disconnection …

Reflecting On Decoloniality And Justice In Latin American Seed System Transformations, Juan Garzon

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Over the last 20 years, Latin American ‘seed guardian networks’ have become increasingly influential in seed system transformations. This is a recent chapter in the decades old transition of seeds from deeply rooted commons to a global commodity, which constantly favours capitalist industrialism over all other ways of being. The emergence and consolidation of these networks is tied to the intensification of neoliberal reforms that undermine Indigenous, Afro-Latino, peasant, agroecological and organic agricultural practices. As part of this process, outliers connect in distributed networks to fight for the inclusion of their practices and visions, exerting pressure on hegemonic actors to …

Making Sense/Zines: Reflecting On Positionality, Lizette Reitsma

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

We have to be conscious about our own situatedness in the ecologies for and with which we design, but also invite for critical reviewing it. In order to do so, to become conscious and to critically review, I believe something needs to trigger and intervene. This paper is a personal account of sense-making and tool shaping, to support critical reflecting on my own positionality. I introduce my two tools: Graphical Peeling and Sensing/Zining, which rely both on ‘layouting’ to provide space for reflection. I am not a graphical designer, rather this way of working seems to help unbalance my very …

Dancing With The Troubles Of Ai, Maria Alejandra Luján Escalante, Luke Moffat, Lizzie Harrison, Vivienne Kuh

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

We are 4 creative ethic-ticians, working in the areas of design, fashion, arts and philosophy, making tools and spaces to inspire, drive, support and assess innovation responsive to societal and planetary crises, which we call ethics through design. We created this ritual to make time to be in our bodies, along with a team that includes musicians, performance artists, aikido masters, HIT trainers, sci-fi enthusiasts, and street dancers, to develop a transdisciplinary choreography. Together we have made a ritual to embrace the magical, illogical, delightful and laughable. We rehearsed with our bodies, protocols for anticipating, noticing, and addressing ethical tensions, …

Communities Of Practice: Doing Design Differently, Kate Mcentee

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

This paper reflects on the role of communities of practice in building and supporting critical alternatives to conventional, Dominant Design (Akama, 2021; Rosner, 2018). Dominant Design refers to design practices cultivated within our industrialised, imperialist, patriarchal, capitalist modernity. Discourses and practices addressing this include decolonising design, stemming from modernity/coloniality critique and Indigenous knowledge systems, and anti-oppressive frameworks for design, based in anti- racism and Black feminist scholarship. These discourses at the margins of the dominant discourse and practice recognise the need for critical alternatives to design practices (Abdulla et al., 2019; Costanza-Chock 2018; Mignolo 2007; Schultz et al., 2018). This …

Redesigning Money As A Tool For Self-Management In Cultural Production, Rodrigo Freese Gonzatto, Frederick Van Amstel, Pedro Henrique Jatobá

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Money is a crucial mediation for organizing in capitalist societies. Those who lack money cannot easily organize and raise collective consciousness. A naive form of consciousness may reject money to prevent greed and envy. Nevertheless, a critical state of consciousness should perceive money as a tool that can be redesigned to encourage different feelings that can ballast anti-capitalist transactions. This research describes Colaborativa@PE, a collective who designed digital social currencies to nurture solidarity bonds in several cultural production collectives spread through Brazil. These collectives embarked on an inquiry that led them to experiment with solidarity economy and self-management. The need …

Solidarity As A Principle For Antisystemic Design Processes: Two Cases Of Alliance With Social Struggles In Brazil, Bibiana Oliveira Serpa, Sâmia Batista E Silva

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

In this essay we reflect on the possibility of politicizing participatory design processes by defending the notion of solidarity in Paulo Freires’s thought. We present a critique of empathy as a relational practice in design, considering it to be an anti-dialogical practice that reifies subjects in design processes focused on developing capitalist commodities. As a counterpoint, we defend solidarity as a dialogical ethical principle and practice that is founded on consciousness and the invilieng and transformation of given reality (of oppression). To support our argument, we present two experiences where we live solidarity-in-praxis while promoting design engagements in Brazil. The …

Prefigurative Politics And Design, Alix Gerber

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

It is difficult to imagine what life might be like without capitalism, patriarchy, and modernism, yet these systems did not always exist: they were built. As professional designers who want to work towards something different, what can we do? Some have turned to prefigurative politics for a path forward. Prefiguration is a political strategy of working towards social transformation by “building the new world in the shell of the old”. For example: solidarity economies prefigure an economy based in cooperation rather than competition through shared ownership of production; and transformative justice initiatives prefigure a world without police by finding new …

Towards A Political Design Through Feminist Waysof Movement-Making, Bibiana Oliveira Serpa

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

From the understanding that design is a complex force of political and cultural expression, I argue that in the design field we need to be with and learn from social movements, advancing collaboration between erudite and popular practices of creating and shaping worlds. In this freely reflection I present some thoughts from my experience as an educator-militant in a political organization of the Brazilian feminist movement. From this background, I seek to reimagine knowing-doings in design by means of principles systematized in feminist practices within social movements. Through these principles, I aim to reflect on possibilities for a design that …

Being Co-Conspirators, Mudita Pasari, Prachi Joshi

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

We live in a multidimensional pluralist world, where colonial, structuralist and industrial approaches of moulding a mind need to be questioned. Perhaps our modern educational system needs to forgo moulding a student and instead insist on developing the potential of a learner. India has long had the traditional approach of rearing a mind which is not bogged down by generalised standards. Despite this legacy, popularised design education here, is a borrowed version from ideologies of the West. The authors of this paper questioned their adopted roles as design facilitators, and conducted a social experiment to decentralise ownership of material and …

I Hate Creativity, Patricia Kovic

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

We love creativity. Everybody loves creativity and everybody wants a “Culture of Creativity.” However, there is strong evidence that we do not even like creativity, especially under stressful conditions. Creativity thrives in conditions of uncertainty, vagueness of purpose and psychological discomfiture — conditions that can be unbearable when added to the current anxieties of a shrinking academic landscape, the pandemic, let alone wicked problems like the climate crisis. We are terrified in these traumatic circumstances, so we shrink away from creativity toward the safety of what is known, understood and proven. As a result, Proxy Creativity emerges — one that …

An Abundance Of Tools: Attention And Care With Theory, Kate Mcentee

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

This paper argues for the value of sustained exploration of theoretical work and practices from diverse perspectives on the margins of dominant systems, such as radical Black and feminist thought; Indigenous research scholars; queer theorists; modernity/coloniality scholars from the Global South; and critical design practitioners speaking from situated place. Reading, engaging, and extending this work assists with recognising common ways in which we and those around us think, work, and relate to others which accommodate dominant, oppressive systems. This includes recognising ingrained white saviorism, compulsion for efficiency, linear and task-oriented collaboration and deep-seated regard for institutional recognition. Beyond recognition, there …

Scyborg Designer: The Ghost In The Machine, Clara Meliande

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

In a world on the verge of collapse, it becomes critical to rethink the education of designers, usually trained to reproduce and maintain the capitalist machine. Here, Advocating for a political praxis that avoids universality and understands itself as situated and located, I bring La Paperson’s concept of scyborg to think about how design academia can reflect and become a practice of decoloniality. As someone that collects scraps, components that no longer present value for the system, the scyborg can appropriate and reorganize them, acting like a virus in the system. By creating a mess in the apparatus using its …

Practicing Place-Based Responsibility, Jean Chisholm, Laura Kozak

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Urgent steps are needed to slow and cease ecologically, culturally and socially destructive systems and redistribute power to those with place-based knowledge and sensitivity to contextual conditions. Place-Based Responsibility enacts this practice by coalescing knowledge holders with long histories of participation in this work – those living and working in ways that express care for place. Together, we ask what are our responsibilities, reciprocities and commitments to land? How can we as individuals and as collectives take up the responsibility of contributing to the places where we are? Within Emily Carr University, a group of faculty, students, and community members …

Visual Exploration Of Identity As A Critical Tool To Disrupt Traditional Canons In Design Pedagogy, Gaby Hernández

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

This contribution discusses results from the implementation of undergraduate and graduate-level projects applied in traditional design studio settings to explore the visualization of identity. Since 2014, the author—a Central American woman of color teaching in public universities in Texas and Florida—has developed multiple hands-on class activities that focus on self-expression, self-awareness, memory, and positionality. In the undergraduate level, these activities start with the introduction of concepts and terminology from traditional design canons (i.e. principles from modernism, the Bauhaus, and other (mostly) Western European Avant Garde movements). Once students gain an understanding of these canonical principles, they embark in a self-discovery …

Wild Worlding Wunderkammer Workshop, Verena Kuni

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Inspired by the carrier bag theory of fiction let us look for alternate ways to do our work. We do this by worlding: by attuning to and melting into the subject(s) of our research; gathering and gaining situated knowledges, interwoven with multiple threads of imagination and desire. But then gathering and gaining is based on collecting: data, objects, subjects, situations, relations; submitted into an order of things, shifted into storages, from time to time put on display. Imagination and desire are stripped off in this process and stored separately, if at all. That’s why we need a different mind-set, a …

Liberating Structures For Pluriversal World-Making, Máille Faughnan, Laura Murphy

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

One-way lectures, status reports, brainstorming, and open and managed discussions can all be tedious, alienating and demoralizing exercises of unbalanced power. We see opportunities to rethink in-person and online interactions across spheres such as workplaces, classrooms, conferences, and movement organizing. We share essential principles of Liberating Structures (LS), a set of 33+ open-source methods for more engaging and effective gatherings. We offer visual illustrations, practical examples, and insights from our experiences using LS for teaching and facilitation. LS, named by action researcher William Torbert and elaborated by Henri Lipmanowicz, Keith McCandless and others, are grounded in complexity thinking (vs. linear …

Feral Ways Of Knowing And Doing: Tools And Resources For Transformational Creative Practice, Cristina Ampatzidou, Markéta Dolejšová, Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi, Andrea Botero

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Creative practices have a role in mediating and supporting concrete, meaningful actions towards sustainability transformations. With this in mind: What are the possibilities and limits of the tools and resources that contemporary creative practices are using to reconceive and redesign forms of interaction between different disciplines, audiences and cultures for sustainability transformations? This contribution presents preliminary findings from a transdisciplinary workshop where the participants were invited to share their experiences of designing or using “tools and resources for feral ways of knowing and transformation” within creative practice. While the concept of ‘feral’ remained open to a wide range of different …

Insurgent Design Coalitions: The History Of The Design & Oppression Network, Frederick Van Amstel, Batista E Silva Sâmia, Bibiana Oliveira Serpa, Mazzarotto Marco, Ricardo Artur Carvalho, Rodrigo Freese Gonzatto

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Design research is gettng interested in social movements in recent years. Organizing tactics like coaliSon-building have been taken from civil rights movements and turned into operaSve concepts such as designing coaliSons that point towards converging interests. As such, this concept cannot support social movements, which are not formed by common interests, but by pressing social needs ignored in official and everyday poliScs. This advances further the revision of the designing coaliSon concept based on feminist literature and on the authors' experience in weaving the Design & Oppression Network in Brazil. This network was formed in 2020 by design professors, students, …

Nested Bodies (Or A Small And Careful Spoonful), Julie Van Oyen

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

This short paper refers to a project involving the development of a material fermentation practice into a process-led research praxis, wherein themes of embodiment and the relational bodily self are explored through direct contact with nonhuman agents. Theory and concepts borrowed from an Okanagan perspective of the body, as related through its language by scholar and land speaker Jeannette Armstrong, as well as from interaction design and a rich lineage of embodied researchers and practitioners, contribute to a re-framing of the human as a body dependent on others in the life-making activities of preparing, feeding, and eating the ferments. This …

Post-Anthropocentric Design: The Problem Of Optimizing The Relationship Between Humans And Nature, Sven Quadflieg

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

The history of design shows countless examples in which design has caused harm on an individual, social, political, or ecological level – even things that are identified as nature, depending on the cultural and geographical context, have already been interfered with by design. All these actions are, of course, anthropocentric – because design is always an anthropocentric activity and practically no processes exist that seriously exclude humans as stakeholders (this problem is intensified by the fact that design is also dominated by a WEIRD – western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic – view that lacks the methods and vocabulary to …

Tools For An Unknown Prospect, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Unknown Prospect is an assemblage and collaboration with Ochre that responds to extractive industry. I am exploring methods of design in relation with the more-than-human as an alternative to design research and practices that serve infinite production and capitalist culture. Ochres are not only mineral pigment, but terrestrial beings that have an ancient relationship with human culture. I enlist these geological interlocutors in creative work and printmaking to make drawings, maps, and books that extend beyond the colonial record. Ochre not only makes color material, it activates its own agency in world-making. It realizes the desert as more than barren, …

Activating Design For Biodiversity, Zach Camozzi, Louise St. Pierre, Charlotte Falk

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

This paper documents a research project that has taken place over five years in the Emily Carr Industrial Design program. Our aim was to uncover methods to connect designers with nature, and to gain insight into how understanding our interdependence might change the way that designers work and prioritize. The act of practicing design with more-than-humans has effectively challenged human-centred design and activated deeper awareness of the implications of our design work. Over 160 Industrial design students, and 6 faculty members have been re-learning our place in the world as dependent among, and interdependent with, all other forms of life. …

Regenerative Practice As Transformative Design Framework, Yari Or

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Regenerative practice is a theory of transformative practice which centers reconnection and being-in-relation as key practices of eco-social change in societies of the global North. It is a practical theory of social change that theorizes the interlinking of the earth's natural ecosystem, social relations and individual well-being. The objective of regenerative practice design is the re-centering of human environments, learning environments, pedagogies, and services towards reconnection, decolonization, and just action now. The short paper outlines a design framework for the emergence of reconnection and being-in-relation as processes that support the decolonization between humans and with more-than-human nature.