[acc-cca-l] Design Justice: Practices for Reshaping the Future

[Alison Harvey]

[△EXTERNAL]


Hi all,

I am pleased to invite you to a roundtable conversation with members of the Design Justice Network steering committee about projects that foster community-led design practices for more inclusive and just futures. Please share widely.

Thank you,

Alison

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Design Justice: Practices for Reshaping the Future

April 9, 2021- 3pm, online via Zoom (register here: https://yorku.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_nf57kdxuSySuOPKe2NIRdg)

Please join us for a roundtable discussion about design justice and community-led initiatives engaged in practices for reshaping the future.

We are pleased to host a conversation about design justice with Sasha Costanza-Chock, Denise Shanté Brown, and Wesley Taylor, members of the steering committee of the Design Justice Network, an organization at the forefront of community-led design for social justice. The DJN is made up of designers, advocates, educators, and researchers, and is dedicated to reshaping existing practices and collaborative approaches to addressing injustices based on race, class, gender, and ability.

The roundtable will explore the work of the organization and the presenters as well as challenges and opportunities posed by designed inequalities disproportionately impacting on already marginalized communities. It will include remarks from Professor Alison Harvey and responses from York and Ryerson graduate students Mina Momeni, Brianna I. Wiens, and Dayna Jeffrey.

This event will include ASL interpretation.

This roundtable is co-presented with the Wendy Michener Memorial Lecture and Design Justice Dialogue Series, and with the generous support of the Division of the Vice-President, Research & Innovation, the Principal’s Office at Glendon College, the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies, Sensorium, Center for Feminist Research, the Digital Media program in the Department of Computational Art, the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York University and Ryerson University, the Department of Design in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, the Department of Communication Studies at Keele campus, the Communications Program at Glendon College and the Department of Social Justice Education, OISE at the University of Toronto.

Presenter bios:

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a researcher and designer who works to support community-led processes that build shared power, move towards collective liberation, and advance ecological survival. They are known for their work on networked social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha is a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Senior Research Fellow at the Algorithmic Justice League (ajlunited.org), and a Faculty Affiliate with the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Sasha is the author of two books and numerous journal articles, book chapters, and other research publications. Their new book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, was published by the MIT Press in 2020. Sasha is a board member of Allied Media Projects (alliedmedia.org) and a member of the Steering Committee of the Design Justice Network (designjustice.org).

Wesley Taylor is a graphic designer, fine artist, musician and curator. He has spent many years “scene building” in the Detroit hip-hop community as both an emcee and graphic designer. He is co-founder of Emergence Media, along with Invincible. Taylor’s most recent body of work revolves around the promise of the future; he imagines that “the future” is his client and he is in charge of marketing for “the future” and branding its many possibilities. Taylor holds a graduate degree in 2-D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. He also manages a five-person artists’ studio collective in Detroit called Talking Dolls.

Denise Shanté Brown is a holistic design strategist living in Baltimore whose life’s work centers the wellbeing and brilliance of Black womxn and folx who hold marginalized identities. Wholeheartedly and with no apologies. As the Founding Director of Black Womxn Flourish and creator of Design for the Wellbeing of Black Womxn, she has dedicated her holistic practice to actualizing liberating and vibrant futures through design. She believes that creative, hands-on healing experiences can shape possibility and embolden communities to develop the tools and strategies we need for collective wellbeing. Her processes and practices are grounded in design justice and healing justice principles, emergent strategy, nature, womanism, and the feminine economy. She holds a Masters of Arts degree in Social Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has designed unique health interventions, community engagement strategies, and listening session models, facilitated creative dialogue on self-compassion and mindful social practice, and conducted design-led research that emphasizes the lived experiences of the people behind the data.

Respondent bios:

Dayna Jeffrey is a PhD candidate in the Science & Technology Studies program at York University. Dayna received an MA in Communication and Culture from a joint program between York and Ryerson University and an Honors BA in Social Anthropology with a minor in Religious Studies from York University. Dayna’s academic passions surround techno-utopian ideology or super-intelligence. Dayna’s current work focuses on the implications of techno-utopian ideology, or transhumanist visions of the future, on the design of artificially intelligent technologies. Dayna considers how does past, present, and future inform technological design. Her theoretical approach focuses on the sociology of technological expectations and ideologies surrounding innovative technology. This builds on her MA work focusing on the controversies surrounding the development of strong AI, specifically by analysing how socio-political and economic issues are seemingly erased and yet transpire in contemporary techno-utopian discourses.

Brianna I. Wiens (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in Communication and Culture at York University and co-director of the qcollaborative (http://www.qcollaborative.com/), a feminist design lab. Her SSHRC-funded research draws on her experience as a mixed-race queer activist-scholar to analyze and apply feminist theories and practices, considering the possibilities and constraints of technologies and feminist methods for digital activisms. Wiens’s collaborative work has recently appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique, and Leisure Sciences, and she is a co-editor of the forthcoming collection Networked Feminist Activisms (Lexington Press 2021).

Mina Momeni is a doctoral candidate in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University and a sessional lecturer at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Guelph-Humber. Her research focuses on digital media, visual culture, human-computer interaction, philosophy of technology, and political activism. Momeni is also an interdisciplinary artist, and her artwork explores the relationship between ancient culture, symbology, monuments and memories. Momeni's artwork, such as photographs, videos, multimedia and installation art have been shown in numerous group and individual exhibitions in North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

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