Event Details

The School of Global Affairs is delighted to host a Decolonising talk on 'Transcultural Dialogues in Contemporary Design Research' by Juan Montalván Lume. Please join us on Thursday, October 31st at 5:15pm in Bowland North SR04.

In recent decades, a common theme addressed by a wide variety of academic fields of Western/-ized knowledge, spanning natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, design, and more, is the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’, a proposed representation of a current geological era characterised by humanity’s impact on the geological and ontological constitution of planet Earth. In the field of design, traditionally modern approaches to the discipline offer a very limited understanding of this phenomenon, which maintain a fundamentalist vision that reinforces divided imaginaries and conceptions of “Society” and “Nature.” This study presents 1) an analysis of the critical reflections from the West over its own modern paradigms, giving place to the concept of “Amodernity” and the possibility of new imaginaries which we could call “Naturesocieties”, to continue with 2) a transcultural intertwining with concepts from Latin American critical thought, and ancestral and local knowledge applied to design, which reflect the pluriculturality and biodiversity of the territory, and have contributed to the development of the “Socionatural Design” approach towards new horizons that challenge our current understanding of what “design” is.