OUR APPROACH
Design is how we bring different worldviews into material form and test how they shape the way we make things.
Refusal.
The academy has long studied communities like ours and called it knowledge. Now that we hold some legitimacy within it, we use that position to refuse its terms: extraction, the gaze that reduces us to our pain, and the idea that knowledge belongs to whoever publishes it first. What we refuse makes room for what we choose to build together.
Disobediance.
Academic conventions of what counts as knowledge, what is “valuable,” and who gets to produce it were largely built by people who studied communities like ours rather than being part of them. We use the legitimacy we have to make room for other ways of researching, teaching, and learning, and to make the status quo a little uncomfortable.
Relationality.
We understand knowledge as living in relationships with people, lands, and ancestors. We begin from our own positionalities, naming where we come from and the power we hold, and our research and design answer to those relationships through reciprocity.