Through Witnessing: Threading the Critiquing, Making, Teaching of Design confronts institutional design education's entanglement with colonial capitalist structures — asking not how to improve the system, but how to teach and design against the inertia it produces.
About This Book
Compiled from the Post-Radical Pedagogy lecture series at Pratt Institute, Through Witnessing assembles lectures, essays, and interviews that refuse design pedagogy's claim to neutrality. The book positions design schooling as a mechanism for maintaining social fictions and national priorities — and asks what it means to work within, against, and beyond those structures. Editors Nida Abdullah, Chris Lee, and Xinyi Li have shaped a volume that moves through pedagogical registers of rage, generosity, slowness, and chaos. For educators, students, and practitioners wrestling with decolonial design practice, this is a rare text that names the contradictions rather than smoothing them over.
Key Features
- 177 pages of compiled lectures, essays, and interviews from the Post-Radical Pedagogy series
- Edited by Nida Abdullah, Chris Lee, and Xinyi Li — assistant professors in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at Pratt Institute, New York
- Published by Set Margins, ISBN 9789083350127
What You'll Discover
- How design schooling professionalises and reproduces the priorities of nations and capital, rather than operating as a neutral discipline
- The concept of designing as a mechanism of maintenance — and what it means to teach deliberately against bureaucratic inertia
- Pedagogical modes — rage, forgiveness, slowness, chaos — as legitimate and generative responses to institutional constraints
- The possibilities, and sometimes the impossibilities, of un-doing the enduring legacies of colonial power within design education
About the Author
Nida Abdullah, Chris Lee, and Xinyi Li are all assistant professors in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at Pratt Institute in New York. Together they organised the Post-Radical Pedagogy lecture series, which served as the generative framework for this volume.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 177
- Dimensions: 124.13 x 17.15 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789083350127
- Publisher: Set Margins
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Design educators, communications design students, and practitioners engaged with decolonial pedagogy, critical design theory, and the politics of institutional design education.