Decolonizing Design

Pedro Oliveira is a researcher, sound artist, and educator. His work advances a decolonizing inquiry of listening and the materiality of sound, focusing on racialized violence at the borders of the EU. He holds a PhD from the Universität der Künste Berlin and is a founding member of the Decolonising Design platform. In 2021 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Arts at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (Finland).

Decolonizing Design? A case for Minor Gestures
What are we speaking of, when we speak of “decolonizing design”? To whom it serves, to which effect it represents a meaningful engagement with change and, more importantly, what can actually be done to enact change – now? Speaking from our experiences within the “Decolonising Design” group, I would like to critically discuss the notion of “decolonization” as both an imperative for design and as an empty signifier – after all, as Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang remind us: “decolonization is not a metaphor.” I will situate these notions through pedagogical strategies that were developed both within the group, as well as in my ongoing collaboration with fellow DD member, design researcher and educator Danah Abdulla, in what we have been calling “minor gestures.”

Pedro Oliveira

Decolonizing Design

Das Dienstagsgespräch wird auf Englisch gehalten. Fragen können aber auch gerne auf Deutsch gestellt werden!