Weaving Together a Decolonial Imaginary Through Design for Effective River Management: Pluriversal Ontological Design in Practice

Design Issues ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
Manuhuia Barcham

Abstract Looking at how we, as designers, can move beyond charges of neo-colonialism in social design, this article uses the empirical example of a design project focused on the restoration of a riverine system in New Zealand to provide an outline of ways that pluriversal ontological design can occur in practice. Exploring how the use of design tools and frameworks (e.g., boundary objects and infrastructuring) can help build out a decolonial imaginary, the article demonstrates how— through our design practice— we are able to successfully acknowledge, and work with, different “ways of being” in the world.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jessica Carter

<p>This thesis explores how the Secular comes to materialise in the lives of a small group of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians in Wellington, New Zealand. It presents an ethnographic account of how Christians experience and imagine the intertwined relationship between the religious and the Secular as they navigate social spaces, construct their identity, and make sense of the world. I argue that the Secular is not simply a residual state following the demise of religion, but rather, it is a discursive sensibility that produces religious subjects, and shapes a particular way of thinking about religion and its place in society. The Christians in this study seek to reject, counter and shape secular sensibilities, but they are also embroiled in producing the Secular. Consequently, they problematise dominant understandings of the Secular and religion as intrinsically separate and opposed domains. Based on four months of fieldwork in a Pentecostal-Charismatic church, and interviews with nine church congregants, this thesis reveals that Christian lives involve complex and multifaceted ways of being both Christian and secular.</p>


Author(s):  
Avril Bell

Settler colonialism involves processes of destruction and substitution aiming to replace indigenous with European/western worlds. But indigenous worlds persist in numerous spaces, moments and interactions where distinct ontologies and ways of being-in-the-world prevail. In Aotearoa New Zealand these spaces of the Māori world persist most obviously on marae. Māori and western worlds also briefly come together in public contexts where Māori protocols are used to mark openings of various sorts, temporarily governing public space and sociability. In this paper, I explore a different case where, I argue, Māori and western worlds are entangled or knotted together in the carved pou in the atrium space of a new community building in Kaitaia.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jessica Carter

<p>This thesis explores how the Secular comes to materialise in the lives of a small group of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians in Wellington, New Zealand. It presents an ethnographic account of how Christians experience and imagine the intertwined relationship between the religious and the Secular as they navigate social spaces, construct their identity, and make sense of the world. I argue that the Secular is not simply a residual state following the demise of religion, but rather, it is a discursive sensibility that produces religious subjects, and shapes a particular way of thinking about religion and its place in society. The Christians in this study seek to reject, counter and shape secular sensibilities, but they are also embroiled in producing the Secular. Consequently, they problematise dominant understandings of the Secular and religion as intrinsically separate and opposed domains. Based on four months of fieldwork in a Pentecostal-Charismatic church, and interviews with nine church congregants, this thesis reveals that Christian lives involve complex and multifaceted ways of being both Christian and secular.</p>


Author(s):  
Melanie SARANTOU ◽  
Satu MIETTINEN

This paper addresses the fields of social and service design in development contexts, practice-based and constructive design research. A framework for social design for services will be explored through the survey of existing literature, specifically by drawing on eight doctoral theses that were produced by the World Design research group. The work of World Design researcher-designers was guided by a strong ethos of social and service design for development in marginalised communities. The paper also draws on a case study in Namibia and South Africa titled ‘My Dream World’. This case study presents a good example of how the social design for services framework functions in practice during experimentation and research in the field. The social design for services framework transfers the World Design group’s research results into practical action, providing a tool for the facilitation of design and research processes for sustainable development in marginal contexts.


Author(s):  
Peter Hoar

Kia ora and welcome to the second issue of BackStory. The members of the Backstory Editorial Team were gratified by the encouraging response to the first issue of the journal. We hope that our currentreaders enjoy our new issue and that it will bring others to share our interest in and enjoyment of the surprisingly varied backstories of New Zealand’s art, media, and design history. This issue takes in a wide variety of topics. Imogen Van Pierce explores the controversy around the Hundertwasser Art Centre and Wairau Māori Art Gallery to be developed in Whangarei. This project has generated debate about the role of the arts and civic architecture at both the local and national levels. This is about how much New Zealanders are prepared to invest in the arts. The value of the artist in New Zealand is also examined by Mark Stocker in his article about the sculptor Margaret Butler and the local reception of her work during the late 1930s. The cultural cringe has a long genealogy. New Zealand has been photographed since the 1840s. Alan Cocker analyses the many roles that photography played in the development of local tourism during the nineteenth century. These images challenged notions of the ‘real’ and the ‘artificial’ and how new technologies mediated the world of lived experience. Recorded sound was another such technology that changed how humans experienced the world. The rise of recorded sound from the 1890s affected lives in many ways and Lewis Tennant’s contribution captures a significant tipping point in this medium’s history in New Zealand as the transition from analogue to digital sound transformed social, commercial and acoustic worlds. The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly celebrates its 85th anniversary this year but when it was launched in 1932 it seemed tohave very little chance of success. Its rival, the Mirror, had dominated the local market since its launch in 1922. Gavin Ellis investigates the Depression-era context of the Woman’s Weekly and how its founders identified a gap in the market that the Mirror was failing to fill. The work of the photographer Marti Friedlander (1908-2016) is familiar to most New Zealanders. Friedlander’s 50 year career and huge range of subjects defy easy summary. She captured New Zealanders, their lives, and their surroundings across all social and cultural borders. In the journal’s profile commentary Linda Yang celebrates Freidlander’s remarkable life and work. Linda also discusses some recent images by Friedlander and connects these with themes present in the photographer’s work from the 1960s and 1970s. The Backstory editors hope that our readers enjoy this stimulating and varied collection of work that illuminate some not so well known aspects of New Zealand’s art, media, and design history. There are many such stories yet to be told and we look forward to bringing them to you.


Author(s):  
Patricia O'Brien

This is a biography of Ta’isi O. F. Nelson, the Sāmoan nationalist leader who fought New Zealand, the British Empire and the League of Nations between the world wars. It is a richly layered history that weaves a personal and Pacific history with one that illuminates the global crisis of empire after World War One. Ta’isi’s story weaves Sweden with deep histories of Sāmoa that in the late nineteenth century became deeply inflected with colonial machinations of Germany, Britain, New Zealand and the U. S.. After Sāmoa was made a mandate of the League of Nations in 1921, the workings and aspirations of that newly minted form of world government came to bear on the island nation and Ta’isi and his fellow Sāmoan tested the League’s powers through their relentless non-violent campaign for justice. Ta’isi was Sāmoa’s leading businessman who was blamed for the on-going agitation in Sāmoa; for his trouble he was subjected to two periods of exile, humiliation and a concerted campaign intent on his financial ruin. Using many new sources, this book tells Ta’isi’s untold story, providing fresh and intriguing new aspects to the global story of indigenous resistance in the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Donald C. Williams

This chapter begins with a systematic presentation of the doctrine of actualism. According to actualism, all that exists is actual, determinate, and of one way of being. There are no possible objects, nor is there any indeterminacy in the world. In addition, there are no ways of being. It is proposed that actual entities stand in three fundamental relations: mereological, spatiotemporal, and resemblance relations. These relations govern the fundamental entities. Each fundamental entity stands in parthood relations, spatiotemporal relations, and resemblance relations to other entities. The resulting picture is one that represents the world as a four-dimensional manifold of actual ‘qualitied contents’—upon which all else supervenes. It is then explained how actualism accounts for classes, quantity, number, causation, laws, a priori knowledge, necessity, and induction.


1992 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 218
Author(s):  
Cecil J. Houston ◽  
Donald Harman Akenson ◽  
Richard Kearney ◽  
Patrick O'Farrell
Keyword(s):  

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