Abstract
With the rising mass displacement of people, rethinking and addressing the needs and aspirations of refugee communities and honouring their diverse cultures is needed. Historically, the textile heritage of minorities has often been subjected to cultural appropriation practices or systematically undervalued and ‘othered’ as ‘non-fashion’. Designers are often ‘parachuted’ into marginalised or disadvantaged communities premised on bringing their own knowledge and expertise to solve other people’s problems. However, there is growing recognition of the need to ‘decolonise’ such dominant approaches in collaborative design practice. Instead of re-enacting dominant power narratives, London-based refugees and asylum seekers were engaged in storytelling sessions and textile co-creation workshops as part of participatory action research aimed to understand what cultural sustainability and community resilience mean in this context. These liminal and peripheral communities actively search for a new voice and identity as they rebuild their lives a new place. This led to understanding the reality of refugees, mapping ways to build resilience within the local community, and collectively framing a sustainable future vision. The paper highlights the research’s contribution to shifting narratives around refugees, amplifying the participants’ voice and agency, re-examining research methods, and foregrounding an alternative fashion and textiles system, grounded on equality, diversity, inclusion, and cultural sustainability. The paper outlines the need for further research into ethics of care, effective impact evaluation methods, ways to infrastructure legacies within communities, and design approaches fostering regeneration of cultures and respectful representation of shifting identities, especially considering the on-going refugee crisis and our collective uncertain future.
Keywords
decolonising design, fashion and textiles, identity, cultural sustainability refugee communities
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.414
Citation
Mazzarella, F.,and Mirza, S.(2023) Textile Autobiographies: Crafting shifting identities with refugee communities, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.414
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Textile Autobiographies: Crafting shifting identities with refugee communities
With the rising mass displacement of people, rethinking and addressing the needs and aspirations of refugee communities and honouring their diverse cultures is needed. Historically, the textile heritage of minorities has often been subjected to cultural appropriation practices or systematically undervalued and ‘othered’ as ‘non-fashion’. Designers are often ‘parachuted’ into marginalised or disadvantaged communities premised on bringing their own knowledge and expertise to solve other people’s problems. However, there is growing recognition of the need to ‘decolonise’ such dominant approaches in collaborative design practice. Instead of re-enacting dominant power narratives, London-based refugees and asylum seekers were engaged in storytelling sessions and textile co-creation workshops as part of participatory action research aimed to understand what cultural sustainability and community resilience mean in this context. These liminal and peripheral communities actively search for a new voice and identity as they rebuild their lives a new place. This led to understanding the reality of refugees, mapping ways to build resilience within the local community, and collectively framing a sustainable future vision. The paper highlights the research’s contribution to shifting narratives around refugees, amplifying the participants’ voice and agency, re-examining research methods, and foregrounding an alternative fashion and textiles system, grounded on equality, diversity, inclusion, and cultural sustainability. The paper outlines the need for further research into ethics of care, effective impact evaluation methods, ways to infrastructure legacies within communities, and design approaches fostering regeneration of cultures and respectful representation of shifting identities, especially considering the on-going refugee crisis and our collective uncertain future.