A Cultural Justice Guidebook Door: Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall
“From the excesses of world expositions to myths of better living through technology, modernist design, in its European-based guises, has excluded and oppressed the very people whose lands and lives it reshaped. Decolonizing Design first asks how modernist design has encompassed and advanced the harmful project of colonization—then shows how design might address these harms by recentering its theory and practice in global Indigenous cultures and histories.”
Quote p. 53.: “To dismantle the tech bias of the European modernist project, you need to:
- Accept that what you have been told about the modernist project improving the lives of the masses through technological progress is a lie.
- Realize that this lie hides the real and continuous harm done to European workers, Indigenous lands and people, enslaved Black Africans and their descendants, and all of the people who were displaced by colonization through mass-produced technologies.
- Understand that the underlying relationship between us and many of our high technologies is that of a master and slaves.
- Technology could achieve its decolonial promise if design technology is based on principles of abolition and done with the consciousness of Indigenous Peoples who practice “all my relations”. “
