Decolonizing Design Book Launch

How does contemporary design reflect colonial influences? What needs to change, and how can design institutions and individual designers make that change happen?

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. In celebration of the release of her landmark book, Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook, Elizabeth “Dori” Tunstall, sits with Deepali Dewan, Dan Mishara Senior Curator of Global South Asia, to explore how we can transform the way we imagine and remake the world, replacing pain and repression with equity, inclusion, and diversity. In short, she shows us how to realize the infinite possibilities that decolonized design represents.

Copies of Tunstall’s new book, Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook will be available for purchase and signing at the program.

Elizabeth “Dori” Tunstall is a design anthropologist, public intellectual, and design advocate who works at the intersections of critical theory, culture, and design. As Dean of Design at Ontario College of Art and Design University, she is the first black and black female dean of a faculty of design. She is a recognized leader in the decolonization of art and design education.

Deepali Dewan is the Dan Mishra Senior Curator of Global South Asia at ROM, where her work is key to supporting and enhancing ROM’s commitment to South Asian Visual Culture through exhibitions, public engagement, research, and learning activities. Dr. Dewan is also an associate professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto and affiliated with the Centre for South Asian Studies. Her research interests span the history and theory of photography, colonial and nationalist visuality, and contemporary art in South Asia and its diaspora.

Thursday, February 16, 2023, 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm EST @ Royal Ontario Museum