Category: Pluriversal Ethics

  • Pluriversal Ethics

    Pluriversal Ethics

    Lead by Malé Lujan Escalante

    Ethics for worlds where many worlds fit, ​a decolonial view of westernizing ethical frameworks. Click the hands on the right to see our Radical Empancipatory Values

    Key Projects

  • Envision the Transition

    Envision the Transition

    Principles of practice: envisioning transition changemaking

    Leads: Malé Luján Escalante
    Chris Mortimer, Management School, Lancaster University

    Envision the Transition is a methodology outcoming from the Refugee Transition Network’s interested in testing the value of Transition Design in the context of forced migration. Among of all the complexities of the context, what the project forefronted was a need to support the inner work of the transition changemaker: how can we build capacity and nurture resilience among community leaders, social innovators, our teams and ourselves. 

    Principles of practice: envisioning transition changemaking

    1. Utopian Imagination: this principle is informed by Utopia as Method (Levitas, 2013; Moritmer & Luján Escalante, 2024) and supports future-oriented practices that are diverse and including of other ways of knowing. It promotes democratic debate and embraces conflict rather than seeking consensus-based, sanitized visions of the future. Utopian Imagination emphasizes collective radical imagination as emancipatory act, encouraging participants to reimagine the impossible rather than extending the possible. Utopian Imagination hold spaces to imagine alternative possibilities, not to plan for a hypothetical future, but for the transformative effects of collective imagination in the present.
    2. Decentering the Academic Designer Role: we advocate for transition changemaking not as  academic privilege, or as endeavour of the design leader, but as relational responsibility distributed across constellations of actors. The objective is then, scaffold publics for transition actions.
    3. Relational Leadership: to think about the transition changemaking operating within networks of care rather than hierarchical structures led by outside experts. This approach moves us away of the ‘chain of value’ approach to a “value constellation” model (Luján Escalante, 2019) in order to ideate, action, relate and evaluate projects. This principle anticipates value as ripple effect of the human and more-than-human relations within the project, that is not constraint by the duration, objective and funding of the project.
    4. Pluriversal Approach: this roots the application of TD on lived experiences, community wisdom, and traditional and indigenous ecological knowledges. It pushes a move from universal (ideas, realities, system of values) to test spaces for worlds in which other worlds fit.
    5. Inner Practice: effective innovation for transition actions requires deep personal connections with our bodies, and with spiritual and political dimensions of change. This principle is aligned and informed by the Inner Development Goals (IDG), which highlight the need for transformative personal skills to support sustainable development.

    Refugee Transition Network was piloted 5 Principles of Practice in the context of Envision the Transition Workshop at the Participatory Design Conference, Malaysia, 2024 LINK

  • Pluriversal ways of knowing: A sharing circle

    Pluriversal ways of knowing: A sharing circle

    Dr Akino Tahir – Resilience Development Initiative
    Lizzie Harrison – University of the West of England
    Vivienne Kuh – University of Bristol 
    Marion Lagedamont – UAL:LCC Design School, Service Futures Lab
    Dr Bruna Ferreira Montuori – UAL:LCC MA Design for Art Direction
    Students & Alumni from UAL:LCC MA Service Design  
    Drum Works  

    Thank you to the young people from Revoke, who hosted the event and participated.

    This was a participatory experience that brought together UAL scholars and researchers, NGOs working in social purposes, refugee partners and participants from the RTN network, PGT students and MA Service Design Alumni. We gathered around ideas, music, rituals, magic, stories, theatre of the oppressed, and movement, all with a critical emancipatory twist.  

    The event celebrated the end of the AHRC networking project by sharing lessons learned from the journey of imagining transition actions in the context of displaced populations, across UK and Indonesia. 

    We celebrated Pluriversal Ways of Knowing methods opening a discussion that considers lived experience, creative practices and epistemological diversity as ways to not just disrupt academic colonizing systems of knowledge, but also, as catalysers of political activation and spiritual connection.

    This event ignaugurates the Pluriversal Ethics strand of research at IsITethical integrating past projects and catalysing collaboration for our next endeavours!

  • Ritual, Dance, Ethics

    Ritual, Dance, Ethics

    Malé Luján Escalante
    Luke Robert Moffat
    Lizzie Harrison, Art & Design, UWE
    Viv Kuh, Responsible Innovation, University of Bristol

    Dancing with the Troubles

    Dancing with the Trouble is a call to rehearse with our bodies rituals for anticipating, noticing, and addressing ethical tensions — to nurture a mindset of collaborative creativity and radical care. Beyond the duties of data management, privacy, justice, sustainability and diversity, we aim to support capacities to respond to uncertainty with music, movement and the creation of Radical Emancipatory Values.

    The ritual started online, in the midst of the pandemic, framed by little Zoom boxes. Mildly exhausted from endless virtual conferences on ethics of AI, we decided to explore ways of embodying ethics, instead of just talking about it. In collaboration with street dancers, aikido masters, HIIT trainers and choreographers, we created a series of 12 values with accompanying movements that could be danced on screen.

    Inspired by Indigenous AI Protocols, Donna Haraway and ritual design, together we celebrate rituals embracing the magical, illogical, delightful and laughable to inspire healthier AI.

    Together we are building on this ritual to design a novel pedagogy for teaching responsible innovation and circumspect reflection in universities, industry and beyond.

    Celebrations

    We have celebrated the ritual online and in person in:

    Human Show Podcast

    We discuss how to use creative ways to form a space of exchange and how to exercise ethics. What is the end of me and the beginning of someone else? We also cover ethics for more-than-humans – if nature can produce technologies, then why would it not have its own ethics too? 

    Publications

    Read more about the ritual on our Pivot paper: 

    Luján Escalante, M. A., Moffat, L., Harrison, L., & Kuh, V. (2021). Dancing with the Troubles of AI. Design Research Society available here

    Care Pavilion, London Design Biennale

  • AHRC Refugee Transition Network

    AHRC Refugee Transition Network

    City as commons and transition to sustainable refugee futures

    Principle Investigators: Malé Luján Escalante, Akino Tahir, Resilience Development Initiative, Indonesia
    Co-Investigator: Chris Mortimer, Management School, Lancaster University

    Refugee Transition Network is funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

    Project Partners

    Resilience Development Initiative Indonesia – Urban Refugee
    Richard Thickpenny – The New Penny
    Ashley Community & Housing Ltd (ACH)
    The Entrepreneurial Refugee Network (TERN)
    Southwark Council
    Design Ethnography Lab, Bandung Institute of Technology

    Transition Design as an emerging framework proposes collaborative design-led practices as a vehicle to create new narratives and approaches needed to address complex (‘wicked’) problems and transitions towards more sustainable futures.It has been developed and used with Traditional Ecological Knowledge Systems (TEK) found in indigenous and local communities to re-design visions of their own development and systemic change. However, there is little evidence of its application in the context of forced displaced populations. 

    Our interest was to explore how transition design informs co-creating processes of new, much needed, narratives about urban refugee management, that would support a shift from the focus of “what refugees lack” towards “what refugees bring”.

    Project Objectives

    • To create the Refugee Transition Network (RTN) with relevant academic and non-academic partners, such as researchers, stakeholders, practitioners, observers, and refugee-led organisations. Through the network, we intend to further reinforce relations, create memorandum of understanding, and assemble a steering group with relevant partners for future research projects.
    • To gather cases of good practice and successful methods in the use of Transition Design and the ‘City as Commons’ in the context of urban refugee management to create a bilingual (English and Bahasa) teaching resource.
    • To gather initial insights from creative workshops applying the Transition Design framework with practitioners and communities of refugees, in the UK and Indonesia.

    Project Activites

    Our work was presented at the The 20th International Association for the Study of Forced Migration Conference (IASFM20) at Yogyakarta,2025 where we chaired a the track “Creative and Designerly Methods”. 

    Upcoming: Refugee Transition Network is releasing a pedagogical methods book entitled Pluriversal Ways of Knowing: A Methods Book: Creatives ways to make communities for transition, to be published in 2025.

  • Value Mapping for the Pluriverse

    Value Mapping for the Pluriverse

    A Methodological approach to incorporate traditional ecological knowledges (TEK) in supporting community-led participatory government for disaster preparedness and resilience

    Value Mapping for the Pluriverse

    Lead by: Malé Luján Escalante, Chris Mortimer

    Project Partners

    Resilience Development Initiative – Indonesia
    Padjaran University, Bandung-Indonesia
    Universiti Sains Malaysia : Computer Science Department, Penang, Malaysia, Thammasat University: Urban Research Unit, Bangkok,Thailand
    National Institute of Geological Sciences, University of the Philippines
    Lancaster University, UK

    Value Mapping for the Pluriverse is a tool to support participatory, cross-sector, cross-disciplinary collaboration in integrating TEK into strategies and policymaking for Public Protection Disaster Relief (PPDR) agencies and communities. The tool is a table-top exercise to map past emergency response actions with an added speculative exercise of integrating traditional and indigenous knowledges into a systemic map in order to identify leverage points of anticipatory actions. 

    We held a series of pilot workshops across 4 countries of Southeast Asia, which started a process of follow-up collaborations in research that still continues. 

    Value Mapping for the Pluriverse has been adopted in other projects related with other context beyond emergency preparedness and risk management. It was tested in the context of integrating TEK in Envision the Transition, a utopian imagination methodology to support the inner work of changemakers involved in transition actions. See More here LINK TO TRANSITION

    Related Publications

    Luján Escalante, M. A., & Mortimer, C. (2022, August). Value-Mapping Transitions into the Pluriverse: Design Notes on Participatory Methods, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Emergency Community Resilience within the Ring of Fire. In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022-Volume 1 (pp. 50-62) available here