Reflecting | Reckoning
The social contract?
“The aim of a social contract theory is to show that members of some society have reason to endorse and comply with the fundamental social rules, laws, institutions, and/or principles of that society” Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant?…NOPE
What did we do to us?…Rewind!
“Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.” (Kimberle Creenshaw, 1989)
In my research I want to investigate how Intersectionality and Borderlands influence the way that we interact in our societies, and how we can act through design to promote change and restore local indigenous knowledge.
Intersectionality is the overlap of race, gender, sex, class and other human characteristics that shape who we are and how we interact with others in social contexts.
I define Borderlands as cultural borders, as intersectional margins, where the racialized view of capitalist and modernist societies define and delimit geographies and cultural identities creating oppression, discrimination and marginalization.
“Border thinking requires a shift in the geography of reasoning, a delinking from the assumption of modern and postmodern epistemology, hermeneutics, and sensibility”(W.Mignolo, 2014)
As a Latinx Canadian brown queer woman, I traverse colonial rivers speaking from lived realities of racial and sexual discrimination. I seek to amplify the empirical knowledge of the pueblos originarios (the original cultures) of immigrant and indigenous lived experiences in Canada in order to pursue and achieve the needed restoration/reconstruction of the social and ecological balance of our Tierra Madre. I am studying my own epistemology, as a Canadian Immigrant: the Guarani culture and its language from my home-ground Paraguay, as an expression of reconstructed memory that opens a door to regain space within indigenous knowledge.
At this moment, I am studying graphic symbols, iconography from the guaranies. I want to explore how those symbols convey the Guarani language and how they also represent their own intersections, class, gender, identity within the communities.
I am also exploring their communal spaces, how land works as a social space where their cosmovision is manifested.
How can we translate this way of being through relational design?
The sense of being a last Action (for this year) creates the idea of an end. But time is a construction of our own colonial structures. Could this be the last or the fist action? Do I need to give it a place in the sequence of the class or of my research ? Maybe it is just to use time as the journey of life, as indigenous epistemologies put it, where things don’t need to be rushed, where we need to pause and reflect, take a deep breath, start over, look back to build a new future.