Paper short abstract:

The paper presents research practices at Design and Anthropology Laboratory, at the School of Industrial Design, located in the historic city centre of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the relationship between education and place has been the terrain and theme of contracolonial pedagogical approaches.

Paper long abstract:

What are the implications of taking the territory where the educational institution in which we are based as our field of investigation? How can we approach the university as a place where we inhabit? Investigating the relationship between education, research and place has been one of the main axes of teaching and research practices at the Design and Anthropology Laboratory (LaDA), at the School of Industrial Design (ESDI), located in the historic city centre of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Founded in 1963, ESDI is closely bound to Eurocentric approaches. It arose in a similar way to the founding of the city in which it is located: as a result of the occupation of Europeans and their ways of life and production. It should be noted, however, that these lands were not uninhabited. Neither in the 16th century, when the first European invaders arrived, nor in the mid-20th century, when Brazil's first design school was created. Quite the opposite. The colonial enterprise, set up by the imposition of monoculture and developmentalism, offered assimilation or extermination as hellish alternatives to those who found themselves here. Design, as a mode of modern Western knowledge production, bears the marks of colonisation and developmentalism. Since 2013, we have been carrying out various pedagogical and investigative experiments with students, taking the place we are in as the ground and theme for contracolonial exercises in participant observation, historical analysis, codesign and speculative fabulation. In this paper, I present some of the work carried out by LaDA researchers.