Performing Citizenship through Design?

Decolonising in, by and through participatory design with political activists in Palestine

“…This requires designers to work with communities to find productive ways to support each other with vulnerabilities associated with violence and everyday harm. Arruda et al argues that decolonising efforts are necessarily full of friction due to affective and embodied ecologies that persist through territorial inequality and contrasting im/mobilities [6]. Smith et al [77] describe a transcultural approach to support safe spaces for dialogue that gives time and space for participants to take over content through the different knowledges produced.…”

“…While it is important to highlight the different forms of communications required for intermediary work and the problems and tensions of speaking for instead of with others [80], in the context of our case study, our embodied positionalities are significant. How we are un/able to travel through and with sites of conflict and contestation is a noticeably unsettling aspect of working collaboratively as this movement between borders and in spaces further underlines the visceral and embodied ways that injustice and inequality is entrenched through particular bodies given or denied access to certain ways of being together [6,86].…”

“…PD, alongside other cognate disciplines, is increasingly engaging with issues of decoloniality as praxis, where critical thinking and doing are conjoined in political forms of community action and inquiry [12,26,31,74]. This growing body of work has predominantly focused on key contributions across methodological and theoretical inquiry [1,47,63,65,72,79]; designing equitably with under-served and marginalised communities [6,17,18,19,36,83,84], invigorating debates in the design curriculum influenced by perspectives from authors and practitioners from the global South [9,11,50], while highlighting the necessity of citational justice in design reporting [48]. While the specificities of geography, intersectionality and working within borders is fundamental to these debates [6,28,57,86], few studies within PD have explicitly discussed a geopolitically informed approach to design exploring decolonising praxis with indigenous activists in the context of ongoing conflict and land-based dispossession.…”

“…In designing with young activists this has meant distinguishing between i) decolonising in design by recognising the Eurocentric frames of reference that can remain prevalent in our work; ii) decolonising by design via creative collaboration as a catalyst for challenging institutional (INGO) perspectives by bringing to the fore alternative epistemologies and ontologies; and iii) decolonising through design by mobilising cracks that aim to effect change beyond research that speak to autonomous and communal forms of action and sociability. Paying attention to these distinctions demonstrates the necessity of unsettling work in decolonising [6,72,77,87] highlighting that contrasting political and institutional agendas -humanitarian aid, development, research and justice -are not always reconcilable or recognisable in the same way by all involved. We argue these multiplicitous orientations allow for geopolitical tensions to surface to create space for ongoing meaningful dialogue between overtly political articulations of struggle and indigenous connection to the land, awareness of how INGOs work is influenced by conflicting justice agendas and how working towards equity enriches yet complicates community sustainment [36].…”