Symposium

Two presentations by Bibiana Serpa and Cherry-Ann Morgan discuss the intersections of design and anthropology in education—where methodologies, ways of knowing, and pedagogical practices converge, challenge, and transform one another.

Bibiana Serpa

Learning from the Grassroots: Objects, Struggles and Feminism

Social movements’ material and visual production is rarely recognized as an object of study by design or anthropology. Even so, these collectives continue inventing ways of life, re-signifying objects, narratives, and the struggle. What can everyday objects teach us about feminist resistance across time? What can they teach us about design? We need to Bibiana revisits design from its margins: the domestic spaces, women’s (and feminist) knowledge, and practices often made invisible by the dominant narratives of the discipline. Using the history of the struggle for reproductive justice in Latin America as a guiding thread, this talk proposes to learn from the grassroots — from women’s experiences, struggles, and objects — to pave the way for a design more committed to social justice, situated knowledge, and concrete transformations.

Bibiana Oliveira Serpa is a Brazilian design researcher, educator, and feminist activist with a focus on participatory and critical design approaches within social movements.

Cherry-Ann Morgan

Design in Craft, Traditions, and Memories

This presentation explores the role of design in craft as a vessel for tradition and memory, examining how material culture preserves and reinterprets heritage. Through the case study of artisanal practices in Trinidad Carnival Cherry-Ann will uncover how craft embodies ancestral knowledge, identities, and evolving cultural narratives. The discussion will highlight the tension between preservation and innovation, and authenticity and representation as we consider how contemporary designers engage with traditional techniques to create new meanings. By bridging past and present, craft-based design fosters continuity, adaptation, and storytelling, ensuring that cultural memories remain dynamic and relevant in an ever-changing world. While also having the potential to become a tool for world-building and futurity, shaping speculative visions that can inform more inclusive and imaginative futures.

Cherry-Ann Morgan is a hybrid ethnographic creator merging research, art, and storytelling through a Black feminist and decolonial lens to explore culture, decoloniality, and creolization.

Two presentations by Grace Turtle and Prathima Muniyappa share approaches to how design and anthropological research impact the development of emerging technologies, and the potential for a meeting of the disciplines to dream up more just technological futures.

Grace Turtle

Queering human-AI co-predictive relations

Drawing from a background in futuring, intersecting with AI research and design for more-than-human relations, Grace will share some of their recent autotheoretical experimentation in queering AI that plays with subversive data practices to distributed agency and co-predictive relations in making and performing with digital twin simulations from a Mestizx perspective. This sharing responds to a dilemma: AI’s impulse to “fix” possible worlds. “Fixing” here means the attempt or desire to secure, settle, or predetermine (un)anticipated realities, which often forecloses more nuanced and unpredictable emergences of bodies and worlds by reinforcing normative behaviors. Grace will give insight into queer knowledge-making practices, orientations, and tactics that foreground fluidity, plurality, and more-than-human entanglements as interventions in AI systems. In short, this presentation proposes new directions, or minor trans/formations in how AI is developed, making space for emergent, queer (re)generative futurities as a horizon of possibilities.

Grace Turtle is a Colombian-Australian designer and researcher queering AI and designing for co-predictive relations at TU Delft (NL). They co-direct “Monstrous Futurities” at Sandberg Instituut (NL).

Prathima Muniyappa

The Myths of the Cosmos: Alternative Indigenous Narratives for Space Exploration

The blanket expanse of deep space has enchanted the cultural imagination of nearly every civilization on earth, its vast scale becoming the fountainhead of creation mythology for sky-bound minds inhabiting earthbound cultures. Indeed, it is the notion of shared provenance that legitimizes every culture’s equal right over the territory of space. The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons but the horizon is no monolithic constant. It remains a jagged line as it wrestles with issues of democratization of space exploration and access. For some countries and corporations the frontier of space is a territory familiar with significant resources and infrastructure to have become veteran voyagers; others take nascent steps, developing strategies to strengthen their space programs; and yet others remain feet planted firmly, gazing at the horizon that never moved, exploring the deep expanse of the cosmos through myth, language, ritual and dreamscape. Indigenous people across the globe remain explorers of the incredible mystery that animate our skies through rich cultural cosmologies evolved over millennia of observation. Their knowledge represents diverse ontologies that offer insight into radically different relationships that humans have evolved with space and its exploration and is a fount of intangible heritage that rarely makes an appearance in the mainstream discourses on space exploration. As humans become prominent actors in extraterrestrial realms, we stirs in our wake complex questions of identity. Whose identity becomes a blueprint for 'humanity’? What cultures are represented? What others are silenced by deliberate obscuration or worse by ignorance and apathy? To suggest a response to the issue presented by monolithic identities and monocultures of mind, this paper explores the storied cultural heritage preserved in Indigenous Communities, to present alternative cultural ontologies relating to the stars, the cosmos and other dimensions, and extended voyages that can shape the discourse for a more inclusive and diverse mythology of future space exploration.

Prathima Muniyappa is a designer, conservator, and research assistant for the Space Enabled research group at the MIT Media Lab.

This roundtable conversation with Mahmoud Keshavarz, Cherry-Ann Morgan, and Dana Burton explores critical questions about the possible joint trajectories for anthropology and design.

What happens when anthropology and design come into contact—not as complementary disciplines, but as fields in tension, in interlocution, entangled in their problematic histories and presents? What happens when they refuse to serve dominant social orders and instead align with the struggles of those who resist them, those who are impacted by their injustices? These disciplines do not simply intersect; they negotiate, they unsettle. They generate new ways of thinking, making, and being in the world, but they also expose the limits of collaboration, the constraints of institutions, and the risks of co-option. When do practices on the seam of anthropology and design open up possibilities, and when do they reinforce the very structures they seek to dismantle? In this roundtable, Dana Burton, Cherry-Ann Morgan, and Mahmoud Keshavarz reflect on the moments where anthropology and design converge, where they clash, and where they force us to reimagine what each discipline can be. Drawing from their experiences in research, practice, and pedagogy, they will consider the politics of participation, the ethical dilemmas of working across different modes of knowledge production, and the uneasy balance between critique and complicity. What forms of collaboration move beyond extractive models? How do we challenge disciplinary boundaries without reinforcing institutional hierarchies? And what imaginaries emerge when anthropology and design are brought into dialogue—not as stable categories, but as evolving, contested terrains of inquiry?

Dana Burton is an anthropologist of outer space. From NASA centers to the Atacama Desert, she follows astrobiologists, microbes & spacecraft to understand the methods to search for life beyond Earth.

Helen V. Pritchard is an artist-designer, geographer, and queer love theorist. Their work considers the impact of computation on social and environmental justice.

Mahmoud Keshavarz is a researcher and writer based in Stockholm. His work focuses on how different material practices shape everyday perception and possibilities of making certain politics.

Two presentations by Imad Gebrael and Farah Hallaba examine how engagement can unfold in practice—whether through research, pedagogy, activism, or creative intervention.

Imad Gebrael

Weaving Opacities: Podcasting Sonnenallee

Much like the majority of its residents, Berlin’s Sonnenallee—commonly referred to as the “Arab Street”—has been othered, vilified, virilized, estranged, and subjected to extensive research as an urban space that disrupts European conventions of city-making, provisioning, and governing. Amid heightened skepticism and increased policing targeting Arabic-speaking communities in Berlin, a prevailing sense of personal and communal unsafety permeates the street. Confronting the refusals and challenges of such conditions, Imad turns to podcasting as a primary research method. Podcasting actively brings forth narratives of living, working, remembering, and negotiating public space. How do we effectively listen to refusal in a podcast form? And how does podcasting, as an ethnographic method, contribute to researching otherwise?

Imad Gebrael is a designer and anthropologist researching postcolonial representations and identifications. He lectures on design-anthropology intersections and is a PhD candidate at HU-Berlin.

Farah Hallaba

Being Borrowed: Encounters of Collaborative and Creative Knowledge Production in Researching Migration to the Gulf

“Being Borrowed: On Egyptian Migration to the Gulf” started as an endeavor to anthropologically understand a personal experience through a process of inquiry that is not bound to the academic and institutional model. This talk takes the frame of the encounter seriously, going through the different forms that Being Borrowed as a project has taken, to explore “the methodological productivities and anxieties in the process of creating a collaborative and a creative mode of anthropological knowledge production on the understudied experiences of migrating to the Gulf.” Through different encounters of absences and possibilities in the process of actualizing an anthropological-curatorial project, Farah invites us to reimagine ethnographic methodology as a public interaction geared towards joint knowledge production.

Farah Hallaba is a Cairo-based researcher and cultural programmer. In her practice, she explores the intersections between visual and collaborative anthropology and curatorial practices.

This open conversation invites you to join and discuss the many forms of knowledge and how individuals, communities, spaces, and environments engage with it.

The intersection of design and anthropology holds the promise of a space where written theorization can be decentered in favor of embodied, oral, and communal ways of being and sense-making. Design, as a field historically considered a practice of doing, and anthropology, as a field concerned with thinking, together create the potential of thinking through doing and problematizing the impact of design’s and anthropology’s objects and systems. However, as practices emerging from academic education, both design and anthropology are embedded in hierarchical relationships that favor research about and design for over designing and researching from within communities and spaces.

In this session, we critically reflect on the positions from which practitioners research and design, and ask whose experiences and practices are considered valuable knowledge, how knowledge is passed on and “produced,” and how it is embedded in different communities, spaces, and environments.

We’ll ask:

• What is considered valuable knowledge in design and anthropology?
• How can we make space for different knowledges and experiences?
• What role does the positionality of the practitioner play in how knowledge is accessed?

As the symposium’s closing event, the format additionally gives space to reflect on the past days and the topics of pedagogy and education, techno-imaginaries, engaged practices, and the frictions and possibilities of anthropology and design.