A Collaborative Imperative: Embodied Design Pedagogies for Democracy

As four design educators from different countries in the global north, and with varied lived experiences, we are alarmed by the global rise of the far right and the weakening of democratic initiatives for social, climate and educational justice. Inequality is rising and human rights are at risk; from the Supreme Court Ruling Act in the UK that means trans women are no longer legally recognised as women, to ongoing rulings against academic freedom on higher education campuses.

What does this erosion of fundamental democratic values, including DEI initiatives, gender equality, indigenous sovereignty, and trans people’s rights, and the rise of the far right across the globe mean for us as design educators – personally and professionally, for our students, our communities, and our institutions? How might design education be used to promote democracy?

We believe there is an urgent need to come together as a community across disciplines to create a critical mass of activist-scholar-educators that embody and enable values of democracy.

We are proposing a workshop to explore the question: how can design educators and students across different disciplines collaborate to face threats to democracy? What would that community of leading learners and learners teach and learn? How would that community (have to) act? What are their responsibilities and possibilities? How can we leverage agency into actions?

This workshop takes inspiration from the kitchen table which has been used as a site of resistance for feminist praxis to develop initiatives, practices, teaching strategies, action plans, ideologies, methods & formats to create transformative ways of engaging our students with the urgent need to recontextualize our current systems of design learning. In multidisciplinary groups, we will work through a series of provocations to facilitate rich exchanges of experiences and development of design pedagogies for democracy.