Decolonising Design within Colonised Worlds: Reem Talhouk (Northumbria University, UK)
Channel: Exceptional Norms
Date: 2021-07-05

Talk held on June 24th as part of the Public Lecture Series 'Critical Perspectives on Technology' organised within the project 'Exceptional Norms: Marginalised Bodies in Interaction Design' and the HCI Group of TU Wien. 

More information here: https://exceptional-norms.at/critical-perspectives/

Talk Abstract

Nowadays in every academic circle I am in the topic of Decolonising Design, Technologies and Human-Computer Interaction is bound to come up. But what does it mean to do decolonial work in persistent colonised spaces? What does it mean to be a decolonised being, technology and practice? Drawing from my own research, experiences and decolonial thinkers I hope that during this talk we can reflect together on how we decolonise our ways of being and research within humanitarian, universities and community spaces. The talk is in no means a step-by-step guide, nor is it coming from a position of expertise. Rather it constitutes experiences of struggle, pain and aspiration within the spaces in which my research and myself exist that I hope we can hold together in sadness, creativity and activism.

Speaker Bio

Reem Talhouk (she/her) is a Lebanese Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the School of Design and the Centre of International Development at Northumbria University. She is also the co-director, along with Dr Angelika Strohmayer, of the Design Feminisms research group and an affiliate of the Center for Population and Health at the American University of Beirut. She has conducted research in humanitarian contexts in the Middle East, Europe and Australia designing technologies for ‘resilience’ with refugees and asylum seekers. More recently, she has begun an exploration at the intersection of Design, Decoloniality, Global (Social) Justice and Humanitarianism in an effort to shift narratives of innovation and the ways in which refugees and minoritised people are configured within them.