Reading group registration

This reading group follows the launch of the The archive of decolonising knowledge, developed by Yaw Ofosu-Asare, which aims to bring together records, ideas, visual culture, oral traditions, and source pathways that support the recovery and organisation of decolonising knowledge.

In discussion with Ofosu-Asare, we will examine how African philosophy can reorganise the terms of design theory itself. Drawing on their recent paper and the ARED open archive, Ofosu-Asare will look at how African making has often been classified as craft, culture or informal adaptation, while its role in organising social, material and institutional life is overlooked. Ofosu-Asare will also introduce the idea of pluriversal mimicry, where plurality is welcomed as content while conceptual authority stays elsewhere, and develop an account of design grounded in relationality, temporality, repair and collective life.

In preparation for this session, please look at the below reading and check out the archive.

Please look over this paper and archive before joining:

Ofosu-Asare, Y. (2026) ‘African design philosophy and the limits of the pluriverse’, Designing, 0(0), pp. 1–6. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/30497671261464964.

If you are an independent scholar, contact RD Co-director Claire French for access (clairefrench(at)cc.au.dk).

Dr Yaw Ofosu-Asare is a  Ghanaian designer, educator, and researcher based in Australia, whose work spans decolonial design, critical pedagogy, and African futures. They are the author of Decolonising Design in Africa: Towards New Theories, Methods, and Practices (Routledge, 2024) and African Design Futures: Decolonising Minds, Education, Spaces, and Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Holding a PhD in Education, they examine how Indigenous knowledge systems, storytelling, and visual communication can function as tools of liberation and transformation. Ofosu-Asare is a Lecturer in Communication Design at RMIT University, working across industry-partnered studios and critical design pedagogy. Their broader practice includes collaborations with grassroots organisations, educational institutions, and social change initiatives, bringing together community-based design, speculative practice, and cultural critique. Ofosu-Asare also contributes to projects in climate justice, disability inclusion, and cultural sustainability. Across this work, they remain committed to equity, memory, and the reimagining of design beyond inherited colonial frames.

Degrowth is an anti-capitalist movement and approach that calls for a planned reduction in economic production and consumption so that cumulative human activities remain within planetary boundaries while ensuring socio-ecological justice. But what might degrowth look like for subsistence Indigenous (Adivasi) and Dalit communities in postcolonial India, who are currently resisting internal colonisation, including structural displacement through bauxite mining activities in Odisha in eastern India, and ongoing police violence facilitated by the carceral state and corporations in the northern state of Madhya Pradesh, that threatens their ancestral forest lands and low-impact livelihoods?

In this reading group, Nairita Roy Chaudhuri will explore alternative Adivasi economics that are non-violent and grounded in a relational understanding of land – one that integrates water, forests, and earth (Jal, Jungle aur Zameen) as interconnected and inseparable from community life. They argue that engaging with these situated economic practices and worldviews can expand our current limited economic horizons and open up alternative possibilities for imagining just and sustainable futures, while also rethinking how degrowth understands sufficiency, land, and socio-ecological transformation beyond dominant Western framings. The degrowth movement must therefore ally with Indigenous and Adivasi economics across nation-state borders to develop a more situated, relational, and decolonial understanding of ‘Land’, while confronting the extractivist and carceral structures of state violence and manifestations of fascism through which colonial capitalism continues to displace, dispossess, and impoverish subaltern peoples.

There are no preparation materials for this session.

Nairita Roy Chaudhuri holds a PhD in Law and Development from Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and the University of Oslo, Norway. Currently based in India, she is an undisciplinary and independent researcher and activist working on climate justice and degrowth. Her research interests lie in feminist-decolonial approaches to socio-ecological, economic, political, and just transformations, and in using artistic methods, including documentary filmmaking, poetry, and visual storytelling, in that process. She is also the founder of Planet Decolonized, a creative social-media venture that reimagines socio-ecological justice from subaltern perspectives, away from mainstream, whitewashed narratives. Her publications can be found here.