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09 DESIGN STRUGGLES

Nov 28, 202529 min read

WHAT IS NEEDED FOR CHANGE?

Two Perspectives on Decolonization and the Academy

Ahmed Ansari and Matthew Kiem / Decolonising Design

Introduction

In recent years there has been a clear and growing interest across the humanities in the ideas and methodologies of decolonial movements. We and our colleagues in the Decolonising Design group, along with a significantly growing number of fellow researchers and theorists, have played various roles in supporting this interest in the field of design studies, building upon previous but often marginal and neglected precedents within the field.1 While such interest is a welcome development, it is one that comes with its own set of problems, namely, the question of to what extent the acceptance of decolonial theory is a function of efforts to tame its meaning and neutralize its political force. A key aspect of this problem lies in the brute but unavoidable fact that universities, particularly those situated in the Global North, are not, and never have been, places that favor structural decolonization, and in fact, as we address in this conversation, universities and academic circuits are key sites for the concentration and reproduction of colonial power outside of the academy.2

Research agendas based on the concept of decolonizing design inevitably confront the problem of liberal pluralistic inclusion, a mode of false or limited concession that works to immunize colonial power against the possibility of its own dissolution.3 The challenge in this respect is to understand and respond to what Angela Mitropoulos has described as a form of “change that does not change.”4 If, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have cogently argued, decolonization is not, and ought not be treated as a metaphor, it seems clear that a critical analysis of the use of decolonial theory within design studies is as important a task as the application of decolonial theory as such.5 Indeed, each of these moments is best understood as two modes of the same basic imperative, an imperative that vastly exceeds the core “descriptive statement” that defines the basic function of universities within established networks of colonial power.6

The following readings of this situation with respect to design studies represent two brief, provisional, and necessarily partial perspectives. While our responses address the limitations that we perceive within the field of design studies, the analyses that we undertake are orientated towards understanding the place of design theory within a colonial context, a context that is more often than not externalized for the sake of defining the specific “field” or “discipline” of design as such. Our goal is to understand what must change in how we understand design in order to be able to speak more coherently of design as a means of, specifically, decolonizing processes of change. Inevitably we must approach the question of whether this goal is itself consistent with the aims of decolonization as such.

Putting Design on the Line – Matthew Kiem

A critical factor in the strength of interest that academics are presently giving to decolonial ideas and methodologies has been the actions of decolonizing movements, movements that have asserted the need for change not simply in the curricula of higher education programs, but in the overall conditions faced by students, teachers, and other staff within the university. As Malcolm Harris has argued, the former is best recognized as a subset of the latter: a curriculum is a dimension of the working conditions of a university.7 The desire for a different curriculum is a desire to have one’s interests as a minority subject realized in ways that majority subjects take for granted. As such, friction and conflict over what is to be taught, how, and for the sake of whose particular needs or comfort are the result of contested material interests within what decolonial theorists call the colonial matrix of power.8

A case in point is the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement.9 While it initially began as a protest against a memorial statue for British colonizer Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, the movement quickly grew into calls for the decolonization of tertiary education across universities both within South Africa and around the world. Even as a contested and nonhomogenous movement, Rhodes Must Fall stands as a clear example of how processes and conditions of knowledge production are intimately connected to processes and conditions of power. Rhodes Must Fall calls attention to how universities continue to embody colonial power even as they attempt to incorporate the ideas and practices of decolonial movements. At the same time, Rhodes Must Fall demonstrates how institutions can be forced into concessions by the kinds of movements that embody a desire for change beyond the control and determination of colonial interests.

A useful point to draw from the way that Rhodes Must Fall expressed its demands for curriculum change is that theoretical practice is immanent to and not distinct from material interests and social conflict. As Walter Mignolo helps us to understand, these terms are neither reducible nor inseparable: we are where we think and we think where we are, even as that sense of location is contested or on the move.10 The work of Angela Mitropoulos demonstrates how change, conflict, and movement are not external to theoretical practice but are part of it.11 The same can be said of design.12 This is why certain theoretical oppositions are irresolvable; sticking points exist not simply at the level of ideas but reflect conflicting interests and ambitions. As Frantz Fanon put it,

The need for [decolonization] exists in its crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the consciousness and in the lives of the men and women who are colonized. But the possibility of this change is equally experienced in the form of a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women: the colonizers.13

The case for decolonization is therefore not one that we can expect to be recognized and conceded to in the mode of a disinterested rational discourse. At some level – whether at the scale of micro- or macroaggression – colonizing subjects experience decolonization as an affront to both reason and reasonability. Coloniality is the control and exploitation of other peoples’ land and labor, a fact that holds even in cases of “tolerance” or enlightened humanitarianism.14 Rationality in this case amounts to the rationalization of a specifically colonial interest.15

Versions of this idea are well established within humanities research and decolonizing literature. The extent to which this is materialized in practice, however, is an entirely different question. On this front, the connections that exist between materiality, power, interest, conflict, and ideas is something that I think is important for design theorists to think about, particularly as we observe the ways in which the field of design studies incorporates the concepts and methods of decolonial theory. The concern that I have in mind here is the extent to which design theorists assume that design can be decolonized on the cheap, that is to say, within a prescribed and minimally disruptive set of parameters. While some are openly hostile to the idea of decolonizing design, a significant part of the problem is that the design field as a whole – insofar as it is governed by colonizing subjects and institutions – still believes that it can do the right thing by colonized subjects whilst continuing to maintain control over the directions and outcomes of decolonization.

I would suggest that the question of design and decolonization has at least two dimensions of significance. Firstly, design theory is of critical importance to understanding the role of design in social conflicts, as both means and agent.16 Secondly, decolonial theory is of critical importance in analyzing the concept of design as something that is itself immanent to history and social conflict.17 This second point matters because a position that views the existence of ideas as immanent to interests and material processes must also understand that none of these terms escape the processes and implications of social change. We are right to believe that design is a critical and necessary factor of social transformation. It would be a mistake, however, to expect that design can be decolonized without radical and contentious forms of social transformation. Fanon is, again, very clear on this point: “Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world” is not a question of managed transition but, rather, “a program of complete disorder.”18 Decolonizing design thus implies something far more challenging than a call to supplement or reform design as we presently understand it. I would suggest that it is more appropriate to view decolonizing design as a subset of the notion of decolonization in general rather than primarily as a subset of design. This is because, notwithstanding some overlap, the constituency of interest and accountability for decolonizing design is something other than what the field of design studies is configured to serve. Taken to the limit, decolonizing design implies a transformation of the very conditions – political, economic, institutional, etc. – by which design theorists make sense of what design is. As such, if the notion of decolonizing design is to match the imperatives of decolonial movements, at some level this must imply a willingness to put the very coherence of design (as “we” know it) at stake. This implies that, as theorists of design, we must be willing to look at a concept that we believe is critical to our ability to affect transformation and understand that it too must be subject to serious critique and radical transformation. On this reading, decolonizing design is a movement for disordering the interests, desires, and assumptions that design holds in place. It is not meant to be appealing to everyone.

These arguments are not meant to imply that design or design studies as we know it is coherent in the sense of having a simple, singular, or uncontested meaning. Design has always been a term of struggle, misunderstanding, and debate over issues that themselves reflect conflicting interests and ambitions.19 What is less deniable, however, is that, despite its relative indeterminacy, the idea of design in practice still encompasses a cluster of meanings that are sufficiently stable and continuous enough to act as a function within the reproduction of capitalist economics. Few people may see exactly eye-to-eye on what design is, but no one can reasonably deny the levels of support that industries and governments have invested in promoting design as an object of research, practice, and learning. The coherence that design has obtained is not reflected in the ideas that people have of it alone. It exists in the sum of resources that colonial power has invested in it, both in its historical and contemporary forms.20 The question of design’s coherence is a question of the power relations that it helps to hold in place, even as such relations may be contested or in tension. It is not to say that there is only one meaning of design; it is to say that the meaning of design is as much a political and economic question as it is a theoretical one. On this basis, decolonizing design cannot but imply divergence and disruption. Contesting the coherence of colonial power is precisely the point.

Design’s elevation as a matter of concern to the academy is reflective of its value to the colonial matrix of power. This is why design has the status that it does within the field of tertiary education – it plays a role in the reproduction of colonial relations. The terms of this value need not be stable for such a power relation to be a critical factor in how workers within the academy are incentivized to produce design theory. This is why decolonizing design requires a willingness to put the coherence of design and design studies at stake; as Samer Akkach describes it, “design” has an “unrecognised social structure inscribed in its very constitution.”21 It is this question of constitution that needs to be addressed.

To take decolonization seriously we must contend seriously with the scope of change and the relations of accountability that this implies. As Rhodes Must Fall demonstrates, the academy is an institution in which contests of interest, desire, and accountability unfold. The good news is that this means that the interests of the colonial matrix of power are not fully determinant of any particular theoretical practice. Such a notion would ignore the complexity of the world we live in, a complexity that encompasses the alternative forms of value that colonized subjects have found in their own, differently configured conceptions of design.22 What it does imply, however, is the need to analyze the production of design theory as reflective of social movements and political contestation. A key point in all of this is that, as a political concept, decolonizing design means taking sides, and doing so amid processes that you are unlikely to be in control of.

A Project Doomed to Fail? – Ahmed Ansari

What does it mean to decolonize designerly knowledge within the context of today’s rapidly changing design landscapes, especially from within the confines of the Anglo-European academy? Despite (growing) attention in recent years to various approaches or movements that seek to institute radical programmatic changes within key institutions in modern Anglo-European societies, as well as effect deeper and broader programmatic and paradigmatic – i.e., institutional and structural – change in societies and cultures,23 little in how the Anglo-European academy produces knowledge appears to have changed.

Certainly, all current indications seem to point to the opposite: the term “decolonization” seems to have been mainstreamed, subsumed under longstanding liberal Anglo-European approaches to social justice for underrepresented groups that emphasize “inclusivity,” “diversity,” and “pluralization.” What we are now seeing is that the mainstreaming of decolonization has meant its interpellation into “business-as-usual” – as given in a recent essay on decolonizing design practice on the website of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA):

There are ways to integrate a process of decoloniality into your everyday practice… [I]t’s not just who you work with, but also how you collaborate. For studios, agencies, and any others hiring for a project, make sure to not only pay your freelancers’ worth but also that the culture of your company is welcoming to them.24

I would say that this is not where our imperative to decolonize should stop. Society is the product of imagination combined with materialized political will.25 There is nothing natural about how our present social systems are organized and structured: they are the unfinished products of history. Given the speed at which technological change is driving social and cultural restructuring in the twenty-first century, there is much to consider about the role that design, as a significant activity in determining the nature of these structural changes, can play in imagining and materializing radically different institutions and other social structures, especially those that are not modern derivatives of colonial histories.

Simply put, it is not good enough to aim merely for redistributive or egalitarian justice based on systems that themselves remain unchanged. Paying immigrant or independent laborers a fairer wage, while certainly a goal to which designers in a position to influence institutional policies and paradigms should orient themselves, does not in itself, in my opinion, constitute a move towards undoing the very institutional structures that depend on maintaining other forms of inequality at other scales and in other contexts, and in fact rely on inequality as a vital component of their organization. We should, especially as educators, ask ourselves whether the constitution of the typical design agency or consultancy, so much of the culture of which revolves around hierarchies dominated by white, male designers who move in elite social circles, and where the work that is done is itself often in the service of reproducing unsustainable practices and lifestyles, is not worth undoing.

In other words, what decolonizing design should not be founded upon is the assumption that we can decolonize design practice without significantly altering or transforming its prefigurative conditions, i.e., the nature of practice itself, the nature of the sites within which practice unfolds, and the systemic or structural conditions (of which material or technical conditions are but one aspect) within which its practices and institutions reside, and to which these practices are oriented towards reifying.

Thus, the decolonial turn in design, if there ever was one, has, by and large, both within the academy and without, failed. Despite the growing participation of hitherto marginal groups in both mainstream and fringe scholarly discourse and political activism and a growing concern with the ethics of not only the practical aspects of design, but larger systems of technical production and distribution, it is doubtful as to whether this has lead to a similar proliferation in the kinds of programmatic, structural, and paradigmatic arrangements that pose as serious counters to, on the one hand, the liberal totalitarianisms of neoliberalization, modernization, and globalization, often performed under the guise of programs of development in the Global South, and on the other, the resurgent totalitarianisms and various (racio-ethno-religious) fascisms of the political right. In other words, if decolonization does not lead to genuinely different social and cultural arrangements through systemic technical reconfigurations, if it does not lead to radically different kinds of technical systems unlike any we experience today under global(izing) neoliberal capitalism, what is it good for?

If we believe that design is not simply a matter of changing politics and political will, or even of creating artifacts with political and ethical imperatives coded into them, but ontological, i.e., constitutive of the human condition,26 then it behooves us to inquire and pay closer attention to the kinds of ontologies that have led to our present condition. To ask what design can be other than the socio-technical recreation and reification of our present unsustainability and the oppressiveness of the modern world-system,27 both in a political and existential sense, is to ask what other modes of human existence can be possible on this planet that we share with a rapidly diminishing panoply of other forms of life. In this sense, decolonizing design – i.e., designerly practices that aim towards a decolonization of the modern world-system and the forms of human existence it enables and designs – means designing towards, transitioning towards, a pluriverse, 28 a “world where many worlds fit.”29 To design to decolonize means to design the material conditions of human existence so that new ontologies of the human can emerge that can counter our present condition.

I would argue that in the interests of continued human and nonhuman sustainment,30 such a project of decolonizing design that maintains its radical force in speculating upon and reconceiving plural human ontologies needs to take into account three things: firstly, a new conception of what design and designing has been through human histories, as the continuous adaptation of human communities to their lived environments leading to distinct, localized forms of life – social, economic, political, and, of course, material or technical, i.e., cosmo-technics;31 secondly, and connected, a commitment to the reinvigoration of the local, i.e., the development of designing and designs that emerge from within the historically contingent cosmo-ontologies and epistemologies of communities; and, thirdly, in concordance with Matthew’s arguments above, the constitution of the sites of political action through which these cosmo-technical designs will come to fruition as functional, active projects of social change.

What role can the Anglo-European academy play in this project of cosmo-technical designing towards a pluriverse, founded as it is on Anglo-European knowledge systems, but also committed to a project of the transformation of “Other” knowledges into forms palatable to its own (produced) subjects and to sustaining its existence as the exemplary institutional form of knowledge capture, dissemination, and production in the modern world-system? In the Global South, projects of academic reform aimed at decolonizing the university have had many notable failures,32 primarily because of the near-monopoly of local elites, educated largely in Western institutions, on both the administrative and pedagogical functions of the universities of the Global South.33 In the universities of the Global North, the sites of both knowledge and structural hegemony, the project to successfully produce radical socio-technical alternatives seems doomed to failure. Teaching white and nonwhite elites to incorporate non-Anglo-Eurocentric aesthetics or even design concepts or principles in order to create yet more artifacts for Western markets eager for novel goods is a travesty of the radical promise that decolonization, as a political project that seeks to undermine the very structures of neoliberal capitalism and modernization, embodies.

In this, I agree with Matthew that the project of decolonizing design knowledge and the production of cosmologically local alternatives does not seem to be a project that can unfold inside the academy as it stands today. Design academia would have to embark upon the unlikely project of not only including the presence and voices of scholars from outside of it, but, more importantly, perspectives and alternatives that have the potential to destabilize and undermine its very presence: it would mean foreclosing on the conservatory, the design studio, the academic conference, etc., as the site of presumably radical speculation on futural possibilities. In the present time, this seems highly unlikely: hence, my assertion that the challenge to Western academic hegemony can only come from outside it.

In this context, Arturo Escobar’s call for a “struggle towards autonomy” can be interpreted as the political struggle of scholars within and without the Anglo-European academy towards realizing their agency as the kinds of subjects that gather together and activate local knowledges and knowledges otherwise in the service of speculating upon other worlds and their possibilities,34 in tandem with, and connected to the terrains of everyday life where unfold the political engagements of communities seeking to realize futures other than that which the modern world-system seeks to impose on them. What this would mean for designers is to forge a tighter connection between projects of decolonizing knowledge, projects of radical programmatic and structural reimagination, and projects of social and cultural transformation through active political struggle: between decolonial design, ontological design, and autonomous design.

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Footnotes

  1. Norman W. Sheehan. “Indigenous Knowledge and Higher Education: Instigating Relational Education in a Neocolonial Context” (Ph.D. 2004), espace.library.uq.edu. au/view/UQ:187777; Norman W. Sheehan, “Indigenous Knowledge and Respectful Design: An Evidence-Based Approach,” Design Issues 27, no. 4 (October 1, 2011). 68-80, doi.org/10.1162/ DESI a 00106: Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry. Design in the Borderlands (Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2014); Tristan Schultz et al.. “What Is at Stake with Decolonizing Design? A Roundtable,” Design and Culture 10, no. 1 (January 2 2018), 81–101, doi.org/10.1 080/17547075.2018.1434 368; Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Andrea Botero, Chiara Del Gaudio, and Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero, “Editorial, Special Issue: Autonomía -Design Strategies for Enabling Design Process.” Strategic Design Research Journal 11. no. 2 (2018); Yoko Akama and Joyce Yee, “Special Issue: Embracing Plurality in Designing Social Innovation Practices,” Design and Culture 11, no. 1 (2019), 1–11; Tony Fry. “Design for/by ’The Global South,” Design Philosophy Papers 15, no. 1 (2017), 3–37. ↩

  2. Walter Mignolo, “Globalization and the Geopolitics of Knowledge: The Role of the Humanities in the Corporate University,” Nepantla: Views from South 4, no. 1 (2003), 97–119, muse. jhu.edu/article/40206. ↩

  3. Ellen Rooney, Seductive Reasoning: Pluralism as the Problematic of Contemporary Literary Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Angela Mitropoulos, “Precari-Us?” Mute 1, no. 29 (2006), www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/precari-us. ↩

  4. Angela Mitropoulos, “Art of Life, Art of War: Movement, Un/Common Forms, and Infrastructure,” E-Flux, no. 90 (April 2018), www.e-flux.com/journal/90/191676/art-oflife-art-of-war-movementun-common-forms-andinfrastructure/. ↩

  5. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization 1 (September 8, 2012). ↩

  6. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003), 257–337, muse.jhu.edu/journals/ncr/ summary/v003/3.3wynter. html; Sylvia Wynter, in The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition1 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 184–252, liverpool. universitypressscholarship. com/view/10.5949/ liverpool/9781781381724. 001.0001upso-97817813817 24-chapter-008. ↩

  7. Malcolm Harris, “Against Everyone with Conner Habib 49: Malcolm Harris or Why All Millennials Should Be Marxists,” interview by Conner Habib, November 27, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5u-LmR_QI8. ↩

  8. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” trans. Michael Ennis, Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000), 533–80, muse.jhu.edu/article/23906; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 8. Walter Mignolo describes the colonial matrix of power as “four interrelated domains: control of the economy, of authority, of gender and sexuality, and of knowledge and subjectivity.” ↩

  9. Amit Chaudhuri, “The Real Meaning of Rhodes Must Fall,” The Guardian, March 16, 2016, www.theguardian.com/uknews/2016/mar/16/the-realmeaning-of-rhodes-must-fall. ↩

  10. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity. ↩

  11. Angela Mitropoulos, “Autonomy, Recognition, Movement,” The Commoner no. 11 (2006), 5–14, www.commoner.org.uk/11mitropoulos.pdf. ↩

  12. Angela Mitropoulos, “Archipelago of Risk: Uncertainty, Borders, and Migration Detention Systems,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 84/85 (Winter 2014/Summer 2015), 163–83, muse.jhu.edu/ journals/new_formations/ v084/84.mitropoulos.html. ↩

  13. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 27. ↩

  14. Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NY and London: Duke University Press, 2002); Tuck and Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor”; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Lauren Michele Jackson, “‘White Fragility’ Has a Whiteness Problem,” Slate Magazine, September 5, 2019, slate.com/ human-interest/2019/09/ white-fragility-robin-diangeloworkshop.html. ↩

  15. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (March 1, 2007), 168–78, doi.org/10.1080/09502380 601164353; Enrique Dussel, “Anti-Cartesian Meditations: On the Origin of the Philosophical Anti-Discourse of Modernity,” trans. George Ciccariello-Maher, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 13, no. 1 (2014), 11–53; Mitropoulos, “Archipelago of Risk.” ↩

  16. Nadine Botha, “The Portable Flush Toilet: From Camping Accessory to Protest Totem,” Design and Culture 10, no. 1 (January 2, 2018), 17–31, doi.org/10.1080/17547075. 2018.1430985. ↩

  17. Samer Akkach, “Modernity and Design in the Arab World,” in Design in the Borderlands, ed. Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry (Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 61–75. ↩

  18. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 27. ↩

  19. Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007); Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). ↩

  20. Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty; Lilly Irani, “‘Design Thinking’: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 4, no. 1 (May 7, 2018), doi.org/10.28968/cftt. v4i1.243.g322. ↩

  21. Akkach, “Modernity and Design in the Arab World,” 62. ↩

  22. Sheehan, “Indigenous Knowledge and Higher Education”; Uncle Charles Moran, Uncle Greg Harrington, and Norm Sheehan, “On Country Learning,” Design and Culture 10, no. 1 (January 2, 2018), 71–79, doi.org/10.1080 /17547075.2018.1430996. ↩

  23. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1976). With regards to a “decolonial turn” in design scholarship (“transition design,” “design for social innovation,” “the just transition”), see: Terry Irwin, “Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research,” Design and Culture 7, no. 2 (2015), 229–46; Pelle Ehn et al., Making Futures: Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); Ezio Manzini, Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015); Damian White, “Just Transitions/ Design for Transitions: Preliminary Notes on a Design Politics for a Green New Deal,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 22, no. 3 (2019), 1–20. ↩

  24. Anoushka Khandwala, “What Does It Mean to Decolonize Design?” AIGA Eye on Design, June 5, 2019, eyeondesign.aiga.org/whatdoes-it-mean-to-decolonizedesign/. ↩

  25. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). ↩

  26. Anne-Marie Willis, “Ontological Designing,” Design Philosophy Papers 4, no. 2 (2006), 69. ↩

  27. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1974). ↩

  28. Subcomandante Marcos, “Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle,” The Speed of Dreams: Selected Writings (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1996), 80. ↩

  29. Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). ↩

  30. Tony Fry, Design as Politics (Oxford: Berg, 2010). ↩

  31. Watsuji Tetsuro, Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bownas (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1961); Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth: Urbanomics, 2016). ↩

  32. Masooda Bano, ed., Modern Islamic Authority and Social Change, Volume 1: Evolving Debates in Muslim Majority Countries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017); B. Mwesigire, “Decolonising Makerere: On Mamdani’s Failed Experiment,” African Arguments 1 (2016). ↩

  33. Partha Chatterjee, “The Curious Career of Liberalism in India,” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 3 (2011), 687–96. ↩

  34. Arturo Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American Modernity/ Coloniality Research Program,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007), 179–210; Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. ↩