Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera, assistant professor at California College of the Arts, writes,
“The concept of a decolonized designer is an oxymoron. A decolonized designer is in itself a colonial thought, one that emphasizes results instead of processes and learnings. A couple of years ago, someone asked me, ‘What does a decolonized designer look like?’ and I blanked; the question caught me off guard and I certainly didn’t have an answer. As of today, I still don’t think there’s a definite answer, but there are many evolving guiding concepts of what a designer is and should be.”
In “Decolonizing design,” Rodríguez Rivera describes the motivations and intentions of the Decolonial School, an ongoing initiative of California College of the Arts. Read it here.
The Decolonial Unconference, held 20-21 February 2020 at CCA, featured a diversity of practitioners in discussion about decolonization as a framework for the classroom and in creative practice. Photo courtesy of Nicholas Lea Bruno/CCA.Find the full Season 8 of arcCA DIGEST, on Indigeneity, here.
