The impact of hedonistic oppressive systems seldom remains contained within specific borders and acts. Instead, they impact all stations of life, permeate all disciplines and spaces and at times, manage to steal away the joy from some of the most basic activities. For instance, when we talk about colonialism (or post-colonialism and neocolonialism) and begin to trace its impact, we find it not only in the extractive means employed by the coloniser to reap maximum benefits but also trace it in methods employed to erase the cultural identity of the colonised, whilst also establishing their chokehold on the colonised landscape by a deliberate re-aestheticisation. As a response to this cultural onslaught, one may witness a clear othering and repression of the subaltern classes (who speak the local tongue and dress the local way) amongst the colonised. However, those higher on the hegemonic hierarchy, often manage to mimic the mannerisms of the coloniser and further utilise it as a means of mockery or to embody an ambivalent identity that can be weaponised to infiltrate colonial circles with ease. After all, as Indian scholar and critical theorist Homi K Bhabha asserts, it somehow becomes easier to assert authority when the colonial subject looks and behaves like their ‘colonial masters'.  

If they’re going to have an Arab character, the Arab character has to be completely white-washed. For them to be relatable, they have to be white in a way to be gauged by the audience. – Danah Abdulla (on the representation of Arabs in pop culture)

It is, perhaps, for the same reason that the anglicised Indian characters projected in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012) and Monsoon Wedding (2001) gain traction over homegrown cinema, or the narratives construed by Salman Rushdie in Midnight's Children (1981) and Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things (1997), while being set in the Indian subcontinent, still manage to reach global audiences. The ambivalence of these characters and by extension, their authors, places them within the third space, where identity markers can be softened with ease—whilst retaining intrinsic narratives—to make them appetising to a largely Western audience. An understanding of the power held by an ambivalent individual from the Global South can also help one understand the significance of individuals in the diaspora. People who have, by compulsion or choice, migrated from the colonised lands to the coloniser’s land, embody a hyphenated identity that gives them access to and an understanding of things back home, while also providing them with the desired means to simplify these narratives and either put them across for an audience to consume or utilise this knowledge to demand and/or exercise change. In lieu of this thought, I recently spoke with Dr Danah Abdulla, a Palestinian-Canadian designer, educator and researcher who was born in Kuwait and currently resides in London, UK. Her interests comprise the study and implementation of methods that can help decolonise design, analysing the possibilities of design education, examining the design culture in the Arab region, scrutinising the politics of design and utilising the means and modes of details within social design, in real life.

Abdulla's interest and work straddle across multiple disciplines, all of which are undertaken with the intention of understanding, deciphering and propagating new narratives and practices in design, such that they not only help push disciplinary boundaries but also assist the emancipation of design from myriad biases. She is currently working as a Reader (Associate Professor) in Anti/Post/Decolonial Histories, Theories and Praxes at Decolonising the Arts Institute and in the Design School at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Art (CCW) at the University of the Arts London (UAL). Abdulla has also previously held position at Brunel University London, and been invited to lecture at Kingston University, Glasgow School of Art and Royal College of Art, amongst other institutions. She also regularly contributes to journal articles, conference papers and book chapters and presents her work at international conferences or as part of workshops.

Hailing from Palestine, Abdulla derives a lot of her primal understanding of colonial suppression from the besieged land. Her visits to Palestine, involvement in various protests growing up and later, academic qualifications in associated subjects, appear to have helped Abdulla channel many of her thoughts into didactic projects. One of these is Countless Palestinian Futures (2021), developed by the designer in collaboration with Sarona Abuaker. Since most conversations around Palestine typically focus on the events that have happened in the past or are currently happening in the region, this card game by Abdulla was envisioned as a tool for people to imagine a coherent future in Palestine. Divided into six different themes, the discussion-based game is designed for three to six players. Some questions raised in the game include:

What would be done with the Apartheid Wall?
What seeds will you plant in your lands when you return?
What form of governance would Palestine have?
What strategies could be put in place to address the climate emergency?
What kind of legal system would Palestine have?

Abdulla also designed the catalogue for Not A Dreamland in 2014, a photography exhibition by Anne Paq that highlighted the alternative cultural scene in Gaza and undertook the redesign of The 1936–39 Revolt in Palestine, a pamphlet by Ghassan Kanafani detailing the Palestinian Revolution. Another noteworthy influence that can be traced in Abdulla’s work is her Arab lineage. The graphic design and sound art exhibition In the City (2013), curated by Abdulla, provided a rare glimpse of four cities in the MENA region, namely Alexandria, Algiers, Baghdad and Nablus, via the projection of each city’s defining sights and sounds.

Abdulla also founded the Kalimat Magazine in 2010. The name of the magazine translates to ‘words’ in Arabic. The non-profit, independent, media production organisation, which ran until 2016, was committed to providing space for open expression for Arab creatives worldwide to help them ‘engage in thought and action around ideas, people and business—challenging the status quo,’ as excerpted on the magazine’s website. With its rich visual quality, the magazine also served as a visual communication tool meant to educate both the creator and the consumer. Abdulla designed a series of posters, notebooks and CDs in tandem with the magazine, depicting certain Arab markers.

Some of us in the decolonising design group have started to almost push away from the term because it’s being conflated with terms like anti-racism, social justice, etc so that all these frameworks become one rather than having a larger understanding of these terms. – Danah Abdulla

Abdulla is also the founding member of the Decolonising Design platform, which concerns itself with the critical reflection of the politics of the design practice, artefacts, systems and practices. An excerpt from their editorial statement reads, “Our premise is that—notwithstanding important and valued exceptions—design theory, practice and pedagogy as a whole are not geared towards delivering the kinds of knowledge and understanding that are adequate to addressing long-standing systemic issues of power.” The organisation seeks to address these issues that have crept up due to modernity and its ideological, institutional and regimental manifestations across the globe. Through contributions at the intersections of materiality and culture, postcoloniality, decoloniality, gender studies, race studies, and other areas of human thought and action, Decolonising Design seeks to understand and question the manifestations of power in the world today.

In the realm of decolonial initiatives, the Palestinian designer has also conceived essays included within the books Decolonizing: The Curriculum, the Museum and the Mind (2020) and Design Struggles: Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives (2021), respectively. The former traces some of the processes undertaken to decolonise educational institutions, mainly universities, museums and galleries, as well as the way ahead in this realm. The book also traces the lasting influence of colonialism in shaping 'structures and infrastructures, policies and protocols, mentalities and behaviours, and minds and bodies.' Design Struggles: Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives (2021), on the other hand, is an assessment of the complicity of design in creating, perpetuating and reinforcing social, political, and environmental problems. The narratives in the book mainly point out the issues that persist within Western notions and systems of design.

Abdulla, who passionately undertakes projects to explore the potential and possibilities of design education, has, so far, formulated various ideas, findings and research into essays and books. One of her essays Design education, disrupted, is a discussion on the constraints that propped up during the COVID-19 pandemic and the inadequacies of individualistic coping mechanisms encouraged in the Global North. Abdulla expresses her indignance at the failure to append non-canonical perspectives and address political implications while calling for transformation in design education and design’s role in society. “The West makes good design while the rest do crafts,” she sardonically asserts. “Design education can no longer dismiss other traditions, looking only to Europe and North America as frames of reference for histories and theories,” she adds.

Some other works in this arena include Gullible Consumers: The Contradictions of Sustainability (2024), an essay within Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design; Radicalise Me (2019); Disciplinary Disobedience: a border-thinking approach to design (2021); A Platform for Third World Solidarity: The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Bulletin (2019) in The Funambulist; and Imagining Otherwise (2020), an essay about the ‘otherwise,’ a space that opens up to accommodate contradiction and resistance by the marginalised; amongst others. The Case for Minor Gestures (2023), a paper conceived in collaboration with Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira, expresses dismay at the appropriation of certain terms of decolonisation, within most educational and cultural institutes. It also details some ‘minor gestures’ that help create the conditions for meaningful conversations on what it means to move towards decolonising design education.

Abdulla’s book Designerly ways of knowing: a working inventory of things a designer should know (2022) serves as a guidebook for designers to encourage design thinking without fractalising it into different disciplines. The book is inspired by Michael Sorkin’s list of Two Hundred and Fifty Things an Architect Should Know. Currently, Abdulla is working on another book Design Otherwise: Transforming Design Education in the Arab Region, which seeks to detail methods (of design education) that can be trialled in the Arab region to escape the tendency of self-orientalisation common amongst those from the Global South. It also seeks to append and encourage vernacular ideas and mechanisms from the region to move out and influence locales beyond their borders.

Click the banner video to view our conversation with Danah Abdulla.