Excellent points.
Unfortunately, we seem to have lost sight of the proposal that sparked this discussion — an invitation to come together precisely explore what these terms might mean in the context of design.
I would encourage you and others to look up the work of the students who were aligned with the proposal that sparked this discussion. Each of them is committed to and engaged in the criticality you mention below, and in various ways, exploring how design might work (or not) towards “social justice.”
Carl
> On Dec 14, 2015, at 7:17 PM, Ahmed Ansari <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Hello All,
>
> After having followed this string of rather belligerent conversations on the thread, I would just like to add that I believe that personal accusations and all aside, I would reiterate that terms like "development", "progress", "social justice", "egalitarian", "democracy", and "free" and "privilege"need to be examined more closely and cannot simple be taken as given, especially for nations that have had and continue to have their foundations of knowledge suppressed, undermined, and displaced by hundreds of years of Western colonization. In many senses, regardless of class, gender or race, all colonized nations share this history and present of coloniality. Once we take this to be our critical lens, we can begin to examine more closely how specific and local histories and subsequently identities and subjectivities of racial, gender and class relations in different countries have been shaped and molded. Moreover, marginality is not a flat, "one" thing, but layered and levelled across different intersections in different individuals according to their class, race and gender. The different voices of marginalized communities and peoples across the globe can help us understand how different marginal identities cope with their marginality. It isn't the case that one country is less oppressive than another, Saudia Arabia is worse than the US or Afghanistan is worse than Brazil, or China is worse than France, some states are free and democratic and some are totalitarian and oppressive (a silly reduction) but that all societies other, marginalize, and oppress their own, and moreover, on a global scale, are oppressed by other countries within a global colonial matrix of power. If you want to read more on this, I would suggest looking up decoloniality and postdevelopment theory on Wikipedia.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ahmed Ansari
>
>
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