Do you want to hear and know more about pedagogy, design, oppression, liberation, monstrous bodies, affect, solidarity and commons design? Join us and listen to this episode!
Here, we talk with Frederick van Amstel - design educator and researcher at UTFPR, Brazil - about critical design pedagogy, the roles of the body and solidarity in relationship to design and commoning. Frederick tells us about his experience with the integration of the Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal's critical pedagogy into design education. In particular, we discuss about how the Pedagogy and the Theater of the Oppressed are crucial and inspiring for developing students' understanding and sensitivity to power imbalances, struggles, and contradictions of contemporary societies, and how in turn they provide prompts to imagine and design path towards liberation. In this context, the (often neglected or oppressed) role of the body can also be a medium to experience and understand oppression and liberation, and it is therefore crucial to explore ways for bringing it back at the center of design discourse and practices. The same can be said about affective relations and solidarity in particular. In fact, Frederick brings us to the underpinning values that emerged out of his and his colleagues work on the Corais platform - a collaborative and cooperative based platform for cultural producers in Brazil.