Decolonizing Sustainability and Impact

The core objective of this course is to enhance decolonial and regenerative-oriented critical thinking on their project in communities in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia contexts from decolonial, pluriverse, and regenerative perspectives that will contribute to your project design process to be as much as co-participatory, balancing power dynamics on decision-making processes and value and recognize local knowledge systems as a pathway for social justice. This course is about decolonial participatory design, alternative forms of entrepreneurship for collective action, social justice, and the dynamics of domination and resistance at personal, community, and institutional levels that the historically underrepresented communities that you will work alongside in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, have been enduring In essence, it is a call for us to heed the growing critiques of the ways that design, innovation, and entrepreneurship (of images, objects, software, algorithms, sociotechnical systems, the built environment, indeed, everything we make) too often contributes to the reproduction of systemic oppression. To advance the growing conversation about the pitfalls and possibilities of design and entrepreneurship as a tool for social transformation, the course gravitated around the concept, principles, and perspectives of decolonization, regeneration, and pluriverse.

“The pluriverse is an acknowledgment that we do not live in a single world with different belief systems, paradigms, or cultures; instead, the pluriverse suggests that we live in a world of many worlds. This phrasing, ‘a world of many worlds’, is essential in its formulation: on the one hand, there is one world – we share a material existence, we are connected in and through relations of power, and we also often share concepts, language, practices, and other aspects of our collective forms of life. At the same time, however, there are many worlds; there are different collective worlding practices that enact different worlds, and these worlds are sometimes in excess of each other.”  (Meggie FitzGerald, 2022).  The feasibility of your project will be in terms of your ability to recognize and navigate the local knowledge systems of your project´s context, aiming to create community-led interventions that envision alternative futures and support just regenerative communities. You will immerse in methods such as privilege, access power, racialized-minority entrepreneurship, Indigenous knowledge systems, inclusive language, decolonizing engineering and design for regeneration, storytelling and other ethnographic methods, circular communities, and developing alternative future scenarios for community-based interventions.

The students will work in groups and individually in different assessment formats that will actively enhance critical thinking in oral discussions in class, story mapping, ethnographic methods (storytelling interview techniques, active observation, observation plan, tec), and individual reflections (Journaling).