KEYNOTES
Arturo Escobar
Friday 19th at 3.00 pm (UTC -5)
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Arturo is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His main interests are: political ecology, ontological design, pluriversal studies and anthropology of development, social movements and technoscience.
For the past twenty-five years, he has worked closely with various Afro-Colombian social movements in southwestern Colombia, in particular the Process of Black Communities (PCN). His latest book Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical interdependence, autonomy and the creation of worlds (2018; 2016 and 2017 for the Colombian and Argentine editions) is about critical design discourses; making links between design, critical traditions, transitions, autonomy, relationship and collective forms of design.
Communitizing Participation:
Pluriversal Collaborative Research and Co-design practice
Abstract
This talk develops a particular approach to participation(s) otherwise, based on a two-fold premise: first, that the imperative of selective de-globalization –clearer now than ever with the Convid-19 crisis–, requires not only the re-localization of productive activities but the re-communalization of social life within a relational perspective; second, that to the extent that design has a role in this process, it needs to be based on equally relational (non-dualist, decolonized) approaches to collaborative knowledge production that contributes to the communitizing group’s autonomy. Thus reconceived, “participation” becomes a problematizing practice at the interface of design and ontological politics.