Month: September 2023

I have decided to focus my ARP on the student project brief on ‘Decolonising Fashion and Textiles’ which I have developed for the Collaborative Challenge unit at LCF, building on the Artefact which I submitted for the Inclusive Practices Unit 2 of my PgCert.

This is the main Unit which I was teaching in the Autumn term, and therefore it was the most practical option for me, as it was already embedded in the curriculum for students and approved as part of my workload. The Unit offers an opportunity for MA students to collaborate across disciplines and respond to provocations set by researchers and industry partners in relation to challenges affecting the fashion system, especially in relation to sustainablity, diversity, and social justice. In particular, my brief invited 30 MA students from various courses to collaborate with London-based refugees and asylum seekers and work on a multidisciplinary project around the themes of: fashion / textile artefacts, ethical storytelling, and project legacy (in terms of entrepreneurship or advocacy).

The choice of this Unit as the focus of my ARP was also due to the fact that the brief is linked to my on-going research project ‘Decolonising Fashion and Textiles’ which explores the lived experiences of London-based refugees and asylum seekers in relation to the themes of cultural sustainability and community resilience. The project offers a safe space and enables a reciprocal process for refugees from different walks of life to meet new people, learn skills, and create fashion and textiles which express their shifting identities and contribute to rebuilding their life in their place of resettlement (Mazzarella & Mirza, 2023).

My personal motivation to work on this brief as my ARP is also aligned with my positionality as a design researcher, educator, and activist, striving to plant seeds of hope and change, especially when working with marginalised communities. I define myself a craftsman of my own life, which looks like a patchwork of the diverse cultures I have absorbed from the countries in which I have lived, throughout my migration journey in search of better education and employment opportunities. With this in mind, I was confident this project would offer me an opportunity to challenge my own privilege, shift power dynamics within education settings, and strive to activate change from within the system.

I designed the brief in a way to aid students in acknowledging the complexity of climate, racial and social justice from an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 1989). Moreover, this project is strategically aligned with the UAL Climate, Racial and Social Justice principles 4 ‘Design for human equity, social and racial justice’ and 5 ‘Accelerating activism and advocacy’ (University of the Arts London, 2023a). In fact, the brief primes students to play an ‘activist’ role, making things happen (Manzini, 2014) and contribute towards social justice and sustainability. The brief is also aligned with the University of the Arts London (2021) ‘Anti-Racism Action Plan’ and supports the process of decolonising the curriculum. Throughout the project, the students were invited to challenge common negative narratives around refugees, explore issues of agency and power relations in collaborative making contexts, develop, adopt, and adapt research methods to support decolonised design practice, in line also with Tuhiwai-Smith (2012).

To help me keep on track during this action research project, I have created this list of activities I need to complete in order to deliver a successful project:

• Attend workshops and cross-programme events
• Attend group tutorials
• Start the blog, and keep updating it
• Draft, review and sign the Ethics Forms
• Design the activities
• Get feedback on the activities
• Refine the activities
• Deliver the activities
• Take participant observations
• Draft the evaluation questionnaire
• Get feedback on the questionnaire
• Refine and print the questionnaire
• Collect responses to the questionnaire
• Type the responses and analyse the data
• Write up project findings
• Prepare the slides and deliver the presentation

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