To complement the general schedule of the Collaborative Challenge with its consultancies with the project supervisors (myself and Dr Seher Mirza), I curated a programme of masterclasses to inspire the students with talks and seminars delivered by diverse guest speakers and project partners sharing their expertise in co-creation, sustainable fashion, storytelling, social entrepreneurship, and campaigning, as well as experience of working with refugees and vulnerable communities. I designed the sessions with the aim of aiding the students’ development of mindsets and skills in systems and future thinking, critical reflection, collaboration, resourcefulness, activism, creativity and collaboration.
I delivered the first session together with my colleague Prof. Helen Storey from Centre for Sustainable Fashion, UAL on 18/10/2023 at LCF East. The session was titled “Decolonising Fashion, for Emergency and Emergent Times” and was aimed at aiding the students in reflecting on their positionality, and exploring the potential to play the role of change-makers, challenging the status quo and collaborating with London-based refugees and asylum seekers in order to explore cultural, social, economic and environmental issues. Given that at the time of this session, the new LCF building hosted the ‘Designed for Life’ exhibition, which showcases my work as well as that of Helen Storey using fashion as a force for positive social change, we decided to deliver this session as an interactive guided tour of the exhibition spaces. In fact, instead of showing slides about our work, we wanted to offer the students an immersive experience and engagement with our physical work, while discussing the role of fashion to shape better lives, explore the reality of refugees, how to create reciprocal processes of learning and making, and what we can learn from refugees in terms of cultural sustainability and community resilience. It was quite an experience delivering a talk about people’s displacement while we were also transitioning to the new LCF building, and we moved around the exhibition spaces.
After the tour, we went to a classroom, where I delivered the unit briefing (see slides below) and Helen and I facilitated an interactive activity, helping the students to form teams, and reflect on the type of change (economic, social, cultural, environmental) change they wanted to create in the world and fashion system, and unpack the values, roles and skills they could contribute to the project, as well as discuss potential challenges and opportunities they could experience in this Unit.
As Helen Storey said: “We cannot ‘save’ other people, and we should never imagine we can; instead, we can fine-tune into reality as it presents itself and let it determine what needs expression, making, changing, inventing, or letting be, together”.
The second session – titled “Art / Design / Fashion as Social Practices for Social for Cultural Sustainability” – was delivered by Prof. Lucy Orta and Dr Seher Mirza from Centre for Sustainable Fashion, UAL on 01/11/2023 at LCF East.
Lucy shared her 30-years of experience as a socially engaged artist, and unpacked some of her past and current projects to exemplify participatory practice in relation to issues of identity, refuge, migration, women’s empowerment, social connections, etc. In discussing her practice focused on tackling social issues and weaving social relationships, she highlighted the value of processes as metaphors, the role of art to create social change, the importance of ethics and the challenges of evaluating social impacts of projects.
Seher’s talk focused on power and perception in design with communities, building on her own doctoral research (Mirza, 2020). She discussed the process of decolonising design, which entails critical reflection, unlearning, relearning, rethinking, and addressing colonial legacies of oppression and exploitation. She also unpacked different forms of power, as set out in Miller and VeneKlasen’s (2006) social sciences framework – power ‘over’ (outsiders controlling decision making processes), power ‘with’ people (design as collective strength), power ‘within’ (using design to build one’s sense of self-worth) and power ‘to’ (design capability to shape own life and make a difference). Seher ended the talk discussing factors influencing power dynamics in collaborative processes, such as community’s perception of the designer, positionality, body language, practice, and modes of collaborating.
The session ended with an interactive discussion about ethics in design processes, community-centred design, and storytelling. Each of the six teams also pitched their initial design concepts, and received feedback and advice from myself, Lucy and Seher to support their project developments. One highlight of the session was when one of the refugee collaborators openly shared her experience in this project:
“As a refugee, I felt like a stone. You need to find a way to share your pain, and this project is giving me an opportunity to get closer to my feelings, and turn my pain into something beautiful”.
The third session – titled “Shifting Identities and Perceptions through Ethical Storytelling” was delivered at The Lab E20 on 08/11/2023. The session was delivered by Tim Stephens, although it was initially conceived also by Kate Keara Pelen who unfortunately couldn’t join on the day due to illness. Tim facilitated a very interactive session inviting us to be present, welcoming every feelings. He challenged the concepts of power and knowledge, how they are created and shared with others, and talked about cultural difference, cultural appreciation and appropriation, intraculturality and multiculturality. In talking about ethics, he highlighted the responsibilities we – as designers and researchers – have towards others and ourselves. Tim facilitated several hands-on activities, such as knotting thoughts, feelings and sensations, writing poems about being human, turning micro-aggressions into micro-affirmations, talking and showing objects meaningful to us, and even played the drum to perform the Rumi poem “The Guest House”, which was such a memorable experience!
Tim also shared a wealth of references and resources, such as the “PALO! Al Monte” song to reference that when we are tired of being human, we need the elemental (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hITdznu9aw), the film “My Stolen Revolution” on Iranian women activists after prison (https://www.netflix.com/title/70285606), the book “Songlines” by Chatwin (1988) on the historic conflict between the settled and the nomadic, and “The Figure of the Migrant” by Nail (2015) on the universality of the migrant and the contemporary importance of movement and migration.
In response to the Rumi poem shared by Tim, Janhvi Chopra, one student participating in this project, wrote “Being Human is a Glass House” which you can read in the image below.
The fourth masterclass – titled “Entrepreneurship with a Social Purpose” – was delivered by Sol Escobar and Sidorela Lleshi from Give Your Best at The Lab E20 on 15/11/2023. Sol shared her experience at Give Your Best, a social enterprise she founded to tackle the issue of clothing poverty faced by refugees, and with the aim of giving people choice, dignity, and a sense of agency. She shared the challenges of a non-for-profit organisation, the importance of partnerships, the role of storytelling, the power of fashion for good and catwalk shows to shift the prevailing negative narratives about refugees. In discussing the impact made on other people, Sol also reflected on the impact refugees have on herself as a person and entrepreneur. Sidorela shared her lived experience as a refugee, the issue of clothes poverty, the lack of choice, and agency, as well as the human need for kindness and love, which she found in the Give Your Best community where she volunteers. In the words of Sidorela:
“I feared being homeless after receiving the refugee status. It was a long process, but you will make it!”
The talk was followed up by an engaging Q&A with the students and refugee collaborators, and we talked about logistical aspects of the business (e.g. clothes deliveries, costs, safeguarding measures, quality control, partnerships and sponsorships, revenue generation, monitoring and communicating impacts) as well as other challenges faced by refugees (e.g. application for the refugee status, financial struggles, mobility, homelessness, nutrition, etc.).
One of the refugee collaborators openly shared his own experience of migration from Nigeria to Ukraine to the UK via Poland and Germany, and highlighted that the journey doesn’t end when you get to the UK. Another refugee collaborator attending the session was in tears listening to Sidorela, and she told me:
“It was fantastic and just what I needed. Also, hearing the speaker was very impactful and inspiring!”
The fifth and last masterclass – titled “Building Community Power and Campaigning for Policy Change” – was delivered by Froi Legaspi from Citizens UK at LCF East on 22/11/2023. Froi shared his experience as Senior Organiser at Citizens UK, discussed some examples of successful campaigns, unpacked the cycle of action, and highlighted the importance of listening and sharing stories to evidence issues and drive policy change. After framing the concept of power as ‘the ability to act’, Froi facilitated an interactive activity to highlight the need to receive support from others in order to collective change the system. When Froi asked to define the most pressing issues we would like to change in the UK system, the students and refugee collaborators focused on mental health support, right to work policy for refugees, and University fees. Froi also facilitated a ‘house meeting’, in which groups of students and refugees shared stories about the immigration system.
Some of the refugee collaborators highlighted that officers tend to abuse their power over refugees, and that campaigning can put people (especially refugees) at risk, especially in malfunctioning systems. The ‘house meeting’ brought to light a great variety of experiences from students and refugees from around the word, highlighting the timescale of the asylum seeking process, the lack of dignity, the sense of guilt that Ukrainian refugees feel for receiving the status quicker than people from other nationalities, the trauma faced by people fleeing their countries due to sexual violence, poverty and exploitation. As one of the students said:
“In the end, we are all in the same situation. I am really glad I am in this project. It gives me knowledge about living in this country”.