Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome. Welcome back to Reimagining and Redesigning with Antoinette D. Carroll. I have a special, special guest. She is someone that I love and adore and have been a fan of her work for years. We've had the privilege to be in some rooms together, but in my opinion, not enough. But we're going to work on that. Okay. And I'm excited to introduce and have us kind of dive deep into her life and her thinking today. Miss Teresa Moses. How are you doing, Queen?
[00:00:34] Speaker B: I am doing wonderfully. Even better being in virtual space with you. I'm just so excited for this conversation.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Me too. Me too. So we are here to really think about how do we reimagine and redesign systems, but we're going to have a conversation through the systems that you are reimagining and redesigning. And I think about the folks I have on this podcast and in these live discussions, and I'm like, yeah, I could read your bio, but that's not cute and that's not personable and that's not authentic. So I'm going to ask you to tell us a little bit about yourself and then also what systems are you working to reimagine and redesign?
[00:01:12] Speaker B: I am situated in a body of a black queer woman. I'm here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Dakota Lands, and I am an assistant professor of graphic design. I'm the director of design justice for the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, and I also own a design studio, Blackbird Revolt. We do amazing social justice based projects, and I'm super excited for what we're doing there. And also, I'm a co collaborator for Racism Untaught, which also speaks to the systems that I'm trying to reimagine and redesign. I would say specifically, I do a lot of stuff in community, but a ton of stuff in academia. And I would say as an institution, like the educational institution, it is huge, and I am trying to work at it to try to make spaces for people that look like us. And so that means reimagining what processes look like for folks to engage with us. Are there other ways that I can educate folks on design and what it looks like to think about creating things based in Black liberation? So those are just some of the things I think I'm looking at. But education for sure. And then, of course, as an abolitionist, policing and prisons is something that is always at the forefront of my mind. At Reimagining and Redesigning, I love that.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: We'Re going to dive deeper into education. And honestly, I want to hear a little bit more about you looking at how do we redesign a system of policing and prison and do we need them, should we get rid of them, should we reimagine them? I think there's an opportunity for us to dive deeper into that. But before we dive into those two areas, I want to think about Blackbird Revolt for a minute, right? Because when most people think of designers, they do go to kind of the more traditional graphic designers or fashion designers. And I've seen this emergence of a movement of graph designers, practicing designers, really looking at, yes, I may be technically trained in this one space, but there's a mindset, there's an approach that I'm trying to show up with in this work. And so I'd love for you to tell us a little bit of how you're using Blackbird Revolt to really design innovation, to further black liberatory spaces and black liberation, as well as abolitionist efforts in itself.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: I love talking about Blackbird Revolt because I think we do some really amazing things, and we're still young. We are at six years now as a collective. That's one of the mindsets, I think, the collective mindset that really has really helped push us forward in expanding employees and things like that these last couple of years. One of the things I would say is super important for us when we think about counterculture in the design industry is making sure that we can speak what we need to speak, say what we need to say, and we don't have to be listed as a nonprofit. I think when you are a nonprofit, there's goods and bads to everything, right? And so there are some kind of teeth. And I don't know, I kind of visually am thinking about jail bars in front of you to move in certain ways or say certain things. I say that while I'm thinking about opening up a nonprofit sector of the studio.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: I'm on the opposite end, crave reaction labs and nonprofit. I'm like, should I be doing a for profit B course? So we're both having that kind of mental.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: Absolutely. Because it's like, I can shift in both of those spaces. So what does that look like for me legally and all that? But as a for profit, the decision I made in going for a for profit is to make sure that we could say, fuck Trump. We could say abolish the police and not have anyone come at us talking about, you can't be political in what you're saying, and things like that. And so I think that was one of the ways that we're like, okay, how do we be counterculture? And I think another way is we've been exploring is our processes. For the longest, it's just been me and my co founder. And so now that we have this team of people, we have to really dive into, what does our process look like as designers? How are we involving our clients, who we actually don't even call clients, we call partners? How do we involve our partners in the design process? And so that has been something that we've really been able to explore over this past year, which I think has been really beneficial to our business model, especially when we talk about things like, what does research look like? Who do we work with to gather that, research, things like that. So really just trying to ask those intentional questions as we move into our fully developing into what we can be as Black Bird Revolt. But I would definitely say it's super important for us to work as a collective when we think about black liberation. And a lot of people on our team are black. And so when we think about black liberation, it doesn't look like one thing because there are multiple black experiences. We are so nuanced, right? And so it is so important for us to make sure that when we are talking about something like Black liberation, we do our own personal projects with those that we are asking as a group and asking as a collective. I may be the creative director, but I have other amazing and creative minds on the team. We have them there for a reason. Let's gather that input and that feedback as we're working together to create things that support freedom.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: And do you see that really intersecting a lot in the abolitionist work? Like, is everyone working for you, black abolitionists or whatever identity they're kind of centering? Or is that something that's more your personal mission that you're bringing in as a creative director?
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I would definitely say that we are not shy about talking about how Black Revolt is an abolitionist design studio. So if you are not an abolitionist, hear me right now. If you're working for us, you are not an abolitionist.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: Let's have a real conversation.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Let's have a conversation. But when we talk about abolition, I think a lot of people think that it's like this scary thing, right? Like you just want to get rid of all the police and we won't have any safety. And really, when we talk about abolition, we're talking about exactly what this is called. We are talking about reimagining a system of safety for people that values people at their core, right? That provides different options for folks when they're in need, when they're in stress, when there are things that are happening that we can't control. This is usually why we'll call the police. But who should we be calling? Who should 911 be actually forwarding folks to when someone's having a mental breakdown or someone's having whatever it is that they need help with? Does it have to be someone like that? And so I think when we're talking about the system of policing reimagining what that looks like, I think one of the things I've learned quite often in the organizing community is moving at the speed of trust. And if those folks it doesn't matter if they're called police officers, peacekeepers, whatever they're going to be called, if they don't have trust in the community, yeah, of course people are going to run from you. There needs to be like a bottom line, what do we want in someone who is keeping the peace? And then what does that peace mean? Right for certain communities, because I can be in a restaurant full of a ton of black people. We all sitting here laughing, and then someone thinks that we're, like, trying to kill each other because they can't understand what peace and joy look like in our community. And so I think it's really about folks being able to create or reimagine systems of safety that recognize all cultures, how we all show up and make room for the nuance. I think there's like, that piece is really, really missing. It's like, you have to walk this certain way, you have to talk this certain way, or you're not considered to be in compliance with what the government has issued. And I think that that's the problem.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: I appreciate you bringing up this idea of nuance, even the reality that black people are not a monolith, right? We've started to see more folks saying, don't send me in one way. You even see that showing up and how people are falling in love with anime and there's the Blurbs, and we're like, hey, we've been here. Y'all just wanted to put us into this one spot. Or we're listening to rock music like, hey, we've been here. Y'all just wanted to put us only in this one category. And yes, I might listen to hip hop too, but I'm also going to pop on some Lincoln Park and be okay, right?
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Period.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Exactly. And so I'm curious, do you see also in the work that you're doing that you're in many cases, Reimagine redesigning how people have extremist mindsets and how that even can show up in the way they design, right? Because even when you talk about abolition, you talk about this reality that people assume that it just means, let's just get rid of the police and everything. And then it's just like, oh, I'm afraid of that. And for some folks, it may be, let's just get rid of the police, and that's their form of abolition, and that's completely okay, right? But for some folks, it could be, like you said, these are the peacemakers or what's, the different pathways and pipelines. And so do you see even your design practice in your work looking at how do we challenge the extremism that in many cases are prohibiting us from really getting to the root cause of these issues? Because it's either yes or no.
[00:09:41] Speaker B: Yeah. So in TEM, Oakland's, tenets of white supremacy there's that either or thinking that binary, that white supremacy culture tells us there has to be there has to be one right way. When we start the design process, we have to go into that being very flexible. I also relate this to my own work. When I think about language and how language is changing so much and so fast, and I think when you have the defensiveness that comes along with white supremacy, that makes you not susceptible to that change. And I think it's super important for us, especially in the design process, to make sure that we can accept the change, accept that nuance, accept the flexibility, and then we won't fall into that category of like you have. To design by the Bauhaus, and we have to be able to create and transform and make things in a way that we possibly have never seen before. And I think that's the agency that I like to make sure that folks understand, even I think everyone's a designer, but someone who's not in that specific role as a designer. If they've hired us, that they see themselves. As a designer because you have the agency to make those decisions and make those choices to help us think and see the world in a different way and be able to visualize that and communicate that in a way that makes sense for folks. When I think about abolition and that concept in particular, and you have people who are on completely extreme opposite end of what that looks like, it's just because they haven't seen the visual that shows the breakdown of what that could look like. And they're stuck in this system of white supremacy, which we're all stuck in. And you have to exercise that muscle to be able to reimagine. So I think we say reimagine, but it is really hard to do when you're thinking about things like safety. You're thinking about people's lives, you're thinking about health care, you're thinking about the way to sustain someone. It's really scary to think about something that hasn't existed before. But I think as designers, it's like, again, we've been exercising that muscle a lot more. So we have that agency. And I want folks who are working with me and working with my design studio to see themselves with that same amount of agency.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: I love know I just had the privilege of hearing this wonderful indigenous scholar and activist on the stage at Aspen Resonate Action Forum. It's a forum they bring together different alumni and alum to kind of unpack, how do we show up in the space of action to build a more, quote unquote civil society, right? But what I loved about that conversation was that she was challenging folks to think beyond the negativity in the world. She was saying how she went on her own journey of unlearning and processing and realized that as she was trying to tear things down, she was tearing herself down physically and mentally and spiritually. But then when she reimagined the idea of building things up and what I mean by this, because some folks may hear this and say, oh, she's trying to maintain the status quo. No, what she was saying was, instead of focusing on, I want to get rid of this, she went to I want to build this. So she's like, I want to build a space of equity. I want to build a space of liberation. And that was actually something of healing for her opposed to I want to dismantle blah, blah, blah. Because in many ways she was putting her own health and her own mind on the line. Right. And I'm curious, does that resonate with you even in kind of the work that you've seen or been a part of?
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Absolutely. I will say one of my biggest shifts was definitely during the Pandemic, like the active shutdown, pandemic 2000 and 22,021 really got people to shift. And in my own way, it got me to slow down. And it also got me to thinking about when I am organizing in spaces, what am I organizing to do and what is removed from me in that process? How am I filling that back up? And one of the things, the conclusions that I made was I don't have the capacity or energy to teach white folks. You all can learn from what I'm doing. Absolutely. But I cannot cater my materials so that you can get your baseline understanding. In a world, in a life that I have been living with since I was born, there's no way for you to gain that much experiential knowledge. So you can absolutely learn for what I do. But what I need to start doing is organizing towards black liberation. And I think that is why I'm at this place right now where it's like that's what fills me up. Although it is work, the same amount of work that I was doing now, it's like I'm sort of getting fulfilled by that. So I don't necessarily think that, yeah, I need to destroy this thing or destroy this. What if I just created something new? What if I had a black school and this black school, you know what I'm saying? I'm not trying to tear down the u of them and matter of fact that you of them can give money towards it. You know what I'm saying? I think it's about what do we have situated in our life right now? What's already the context and how can I just create certain spaces? I don't necessarily feel like I have the energy to tear them down, which I feel like that's kind of what you're saying. I don't have the energy to dismantle or destroy this thing right now, but what I can do is build up this other thing. And so that's the space that I'm in right now is like, what's the new thing that I can build? How can I get these institutions who might have been harmful to actually support what I'm doing? There's certain ways that we can protect ourselves in that, even in working with some of the oppressive systems. But I think I am in that same space that resonates with me to build something new.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: I think that also speaks very clearly to one of the big projects you've been working on for the last couple of years. So you have two books that are coming out in the years of the 20 or the 23.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: I do.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Like you said, you ain't working less. You just working focused, right?
[00:15:03] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: And one of the books is around Racism Untaught, which is a framework you and Lisa Mercer developed. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that. And then the other book, know, the Anthology of Blackness, the State of Black Design, which I have the privilege to write a chapter in which I appreciate you for me and one of our team members, Maya Williams. And so it was an honor putting in on that. I'm like, oh, thank goodness we got it done, and thank goodness you were flexible, because not everybody can do MLA and all these other things, asking the but, you know, you provided a pathway for us to get our voice out, which is wonderful. And based on just what you were just saying, what motivated you to write these two books at the same time, and what are some of the key messages you're trying to convey from these two very different but very interconnected books in themselves?
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Absolutely. So what you just said interconnected. One thing that I think folks are always in awe about is like, oh, wow, you've created like, you do all these things, and it's like they are so interconnected. It is really just it's like conversation and then a building off of that conversation and building off of that conversation. So I would definitely say that if you were to get both of these books, which you definitely should, you can.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Find them on MIT Press, Amazon, Listen Bookstore, indie bookstore. We don't support it, okay?
[00:16:27] Speaker B: Period. But they will talk to each other. There will be similar things found in both of those books. Racism on Top was really built off of my own necessity and Lisa's necessity of being the only teacher and most times the only person of color in your faculty to be talking about these issues in the classroom. And so we wanted to create something where it's like, okay, the weight needs to be off of us. Can we create a tool that the weight can be shifted to some of these other folks? So you all can talk about racism because you need to be talking about it, too, since you benefit from it? How can you bring those topics into the classroom, in any topic, in any class, in any subject matter? So Racism on Taught was created off of that. And then the book was really built based on I mean, we were doing so much work. We started Racism on Taught in 2018, and we held our first workshop at the Design Plus Diversity Summit. And so we had been building on this work and writing about this work so much that we had a lot of content. It was really more so about Delimiting and Structuring and figuring out how we can dive deeper into some of the things that we had already discussed, because we had been doing the work so long and working with someone like Lisa, props to her. I think we just have such similar working styles. We were there to get it done. We were there to write about it, get it done. And so that was a really good book writing process for me. And I love what we've created and that we have the companion toolkit to go with that. And so, yes, that one was created as this necessity. We're like, okay, we're the only ones. How do we empower white folks and other people who are not like us or don't feel comfortable to talk about racism? So that's where that one kind of came out of. And we do talk about collective liberation in that one. The other book, on the other hand, the Anthology of Blackness, that book came out of 2020 as well, but for a different reason. That one came out from we have the Murder of George Floyd. I'm situated here in Minneapolis. All the chaos going around, and so many folks, I think, were trying to speak for us. And I really believe that that book brings together so many brilliant black creators, educators, scholars, designers to speak for ourselves. And one thing I don't mind, again, for other non black people to learn based off of those conversations and the stories that are being told in this book. But one thing that is the most important for me is that when a black person picks up that book, that they feel validated, that they feel seen, that they feel like there are other folks who are fighting this fight with them, that look like them, and that we have a collective of people. And this is not the only book, right, that has come out to do this, but there's a collective of us really working together for the same goal, for black people to be free in this country. And so what does that look like as a designer and in the design field? And I think, for me, that's what the anthology is based in. It's based in validation for us. It is based in our voice. It's based in uplifting us because there was a lot of not fighting, necessarily, but a lot of points of strain when I was talking to the producers of this, like, hey, the publishers, I know you all like this, but we're basing this off lived experience. We're basing their expertise off of this. And so we had to have really intentional conversations about what that looked like in regard to their academic work versus what our work is, right? Because no one has the expertise of being a black person like a black person. And so you can cite all the people that you want, but the lived experiences, but me walking in the hallways and being the only black faculty member at my institution right now, you can research that all you want to, but I'm living right here. I am living proof right here. And so that's what I really wanted. I wanted black people to feel validated, and I wanted us to be valued for our lived expertise, because that is so devalued in the academy. It's so devalued in written work. And I wanted us to be a way of holding that history, like, solidifying it in a way, like, snapshot of what it looked like in 2020 for us. And you'll see a lot of those stories in place in the work that we're doing.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: Let's give a moment of pause, as the Queen Beyonce says, going on mute. Okay, let's mute for a second to allow the greatness that just came from Know. Thank you for dropping that. And I think that's actually a perfect segue into this activity we do here at Reimagine redesigning, because I feel like you came with all the heat that I feel like people need moments to really kind of cleanse the palette. Cleanse the palette.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: Okay. All right. We're cleansing the palate.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: We're cleansing the palate a bit, because the reality is this work is hard. This work is messy. It's so much emotional toll that comes in. We talk about 2020. We have to look at the reality. For some of us, not only were we dealing with a health pandemic, we also was dealing with the substantial sustained pandemic of not having access to healthy food, not having public transportation, not having access to health care, all of those things. And also dealing with the murder of George Floyd. All of that was showing up for some of us. And then we were still asked to show up. I tell people all the time, when I think about 2020, I just see a dark haze. I know I survived. It obviously pulled through. But it was such a hard time. My organization scaled because we had to. The influx of interest made us scale at a level that I didn't think we would do so rapidly. We went from three to 24 in a year and a half. That's a huge weight. And I'm going to tell you right now, for the people that's listening as entrepreneurs, I'm going to take don't ever, don't you do it from lived experience. Maybe not do that in the middle of a pandemic and also, quote unquote, racial reckoning, even though I would really challenge that because I was actually usually the pessimist in the room. I tell you right now, I am actually a realist. There's a moment when you have the optimisms. There's moment when you have the pessimist, but I'm a realist. And everyone said, oh, it seems so different, but yet there's articles coming out now that said that the commitments that was given around philanthropy to black led organizations, 97% still have yet to be fulfilled.
97%. And at that time, Bloomberg had asked me, did an interview, and they put me in one of their articles, and I literally talked about white supremacy. And I also talked about performative activism and the fact that I was seeing that. But some people say, oh, you're being a naysayer. And I'm like, Look, I'm from Ferguson. I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. I remember what it was where there was an influx of interest. I usually equate it to national. Know we have an influx of absolutely when we learn about these things, and then it's like, OOH, squirrel. But yet the people that were left behind still have to grapple with that reality. But what is that like at such a systemic level when it impacts entire cultures? We don't clear up the palate because you all know it'll be too heavy to keep going without a moment of pause know? There's an activity that we are doing at Reimagining redesigning. So there's some colleagues of mine that created different frameworks around equity design, like Creative Reaction Lab did. Ours is Equity Center community Design. There's liberatory design. There's design justice. There's equity x design. The list goes on, right? But one of the things I admire from these groups is that they created what they would call equity pauses, which allow space for reflection and kind of humility and unpacking as you're doing the deep work. So I'm remixing that a bit, and I am asking people to take a Liberatory pause, a liberation pause. Okay.
While we're doing this deep work and unpacking the idea of what does it mean to Reimagine redesign, I also want us to think about how does liberation show up for us and what are the things that spark joy and liberation in our life? So with that, I am going to give you some categories, and I'm going to ask you to come up with the first thing that come to mind. You'll have to give us a little weed. No one asked for the My law. We already just got that. We're going to get some more later. It's kind of like, yes, you throw it out. You hear it, you throw it out. Okay, you ready for this? All right, so since we already was talking about Lincoln Park, R B, all those things earlier, I'm going to ask you, when you think of liberation, what song comes up for you?
[00:24:44] Speaker B: It had to be the album, like, at this moment, the Renaissance album, you know, like that right there. Like that. I'm like, yes, I just want to be free. And I even think about the song that she did about the, like, going in there. This is my body. I'm free today. As someone who has been very harmed by the like, that's what I think about. I think about Beyonce's Renaissance album, and that's how it's speaking to me. It just speaks to me.
[00:25:08] Speaker A: Look have listened through it repeatedly.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: Yes know, every one.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: I will say Summer Renaissance is my favorite song. Alien Superstar follows after those I could keep going back to. Without a question. Without a question.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: Same.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: Okay. TV show.
[00:25:25] Speaker B: I am not a TV girly. I don't even have one.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: That's okay. Do you watch anime?
[00:25:31] Speaker B: I do watch anime. One that I will rewatch often is the Inuyasha series. I love just I love it. I'll always be down for Sailor Moon, even though it feels very trivial now. Like, I'm looking at it, I'm like, oh, my gosh, she was so obsessed with that man. But, yeah, I will definitely turn on a good anime, for sure. And I'm also a Sci-fi girly, so definitely into Game of Thrones, House of Dragons, Bridgerton, all of the things that sort of reimagine history or look at different worlds. I love that.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: I love that so much. I will say, I love how I said TV show. You're like, I don't really watch TV. And then I'm like anime. You're like, oh, that yeah, yeah, that's a TV show. There you go. I am more of a fairy tale and tackle Titan Girl by, you know.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: Listen and all good.
[00:26:16] Speaker A: All of good. All good. Me and my son still have this debate on the best opening, and no one could touch Attack on Titan season one opening for me. You just can't.
[00:26:25] Speaker B: You're right.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: I'm just saying. What about color?
[00:26:28] Speaker B: You see yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow. It just brightens your day. You feeling gloomy. It became rain outside, but my couch is yellow in my living room, so I love yellow. Yellow is just such a happy color.
[00:26:40] Speaker A: I love it. It's a good color. Geographic location.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: Probably Panama or Ghana.
[00:26:46] Speaker A: You know, I've actually never been to either one of those.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: So I was born in Panama. Just revisited there for the first time in my whole life with my mother.
The year after 2021. And then I just came back from Ghana, visiting the whole West Africa and Ghana, I would retire there. I loved it. The price point is where it needs to be, okay? And it's also as developed as it needs to be. And there's so many beautiful black people.
[00:27:12] Speaker A: We're going to make sure we don't say that out loud. That might change the price point these days.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: Listen, keep it on a low, okay? Keep it on a low. But I'm letting you all black people.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: Know exactly just a couple of more piece of art or design.
[00:27:26] Speaker B: I do things in threes, and I hate to not be like, oh, someone else's work. I'm going to call my own work. But I do things in threes. These three right here is a beautiful series. We are the ones, we the people. We should not be moved. And I think that is drawing on my collectivism right now and how I know that that's necessary for us to find liberation. And so I love those pieces.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: Okay, for the folks listening, go to Blackbird Revolt. You will see these three pieces that she's referencing. They are dope because we actually own a couple of them at my organization as well. So please check them out. Animal.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: First off, the orcas is killing it now, okay? So I'm going to have to go with orca. They just seem like, stop messing with us because it's the revolution. So orca is what I'm going to say.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Got it. Love it. I'm going to do a free for all open season, anything that comes to mind with you when it comes to liberation, you can pick your own category. What are you thinking?
[00:28:21] Speaker B: Roller skating, of course. Roller skating, okay. Like when you get on M skates, first off, I can move so much faster, but the wind is just blowing. You got the old school R and B soul.
I love the whole feeling of roller skating, matter of fact, makes you want to roller skate today. But yes, when I think about liberation, I think about being able to roller skate freely, doing your thing, letting a wind move through your Afro. Love it.
[00:28:50] Speaker A: I love it. That's amazing. So thank you for doing that with me. So let's jump back into it a bit. Right? So in the beginning you talked about it. We talked a little bit about the abolitionist journey and Reimagined redesigning, policing and community safety and the things that impact all of us across the globe. Right. And you called out a very large industry as well. One of the industries that we refer to as narrative and livelihood shapers, I refer to this industry amongst three others that impact our life expectancy, quality of life, and the perceptions we have about ourselves and others. And that industry is the education space. So you are a professor, right. I love when you actually came in literally says Professor Moses. I'm like, but you know so you're an assistant professor in graphic design. You talked about UNM a know director of design justice. And I'm curious, like, how do you engage your students? And you can also speak to administrative or faculty. But first, I'm a center on students in antiracism, anti oppressive frameworks that can kind of challenge the canon of graphic design education in itself.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: I would say I love being in the classroom. It is my most favorite part of doing this job. And I will say it's because the classroom is a space that I think has socially been framed as this space that the students don't know. You don't know anything. One of the ways that I like to frame it as is like, I don't know anything either. As a professor coming into that space, I don't know anything either. We all don't know nothing. So we're all just here discovering. And I love that. I love that aspect of it. I will say before I even get into, let's open up Illustrator, open up InDesign, let's look at this project, look at this brief blah blah. We're looking at positionality. Positionality is what informs every single thing that you will do from here in the classroom. You as a design practitioner. It will inform your everyday steps, who you are interested in dating, everything. And so if we don't understand that piece of it, how can we design for other people who are not in our same groups, right? And so first week, we're spending it on positionality. We're talking about who your mama was, who your cousins are, where your ancestry lies, what was your economic background. Of course, race, gender, sexuality. We're talking about all of those things because they inform everything that you're going to be creating. And so I would say that is the number one way in which I find it so important to engage with students. Because the more they learn about themselves, the easier then it becomes for them to talk about the system around them, because they understand their positionality, how they are positioned within the context of oppression, into the context of even the academic institution. And then from there, how then do we move into you understanding your own agency now as this up and coming designer? What can you do with the powers that you're about to learn? How can you use them for good? And I will say, in Minneapolis, it's really an amazing place to be because the students have lived through the 2020 George Floyd murder. And so you have these students who are on fire to be like, okay, what can I do? Because the world is shit right now. What am I doing to help my community? And so I've been privileged to be with students in the room who have that mindset. I will say, additionally, I still think about the collective. So positionality is an individual, but then how are we working as a collective? And so community agreements have really expanded over the last couple of years for me. How do we create the culture of the classroom? Again, we all don't know anything. How are we creating the culture of the classroom together? And so I would say that is the first two things I'm working on. I'm not opening up a project or anything. We are working on who are you? Who are we? And that's like the first framing questions of what the first week of a class with me looks like.
[00:32:38] Speaker A: I love that. So, in a sense, you're also kind of reimagining design the classroom experience.
[00:32:43] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:32:44] Speaker A: Their mindsets, their approaches. You're thinking about who they are currently and also who they will be in the future when they have this power, right? Because their positionality changes over time. And if that's the first thing they're working on, then hopefully they keep that in their mindset. So as they shift in their career and in their life, they are constantly reflecting on their positionality and also how that shows up with their power and the work that they're doing. Also, what's the experience we're having in this classroom? And it takes me back, I guess I said, Harken, y'all don't laugh at me, but to my first graphic design class, where my teacher said, I cannot define what design is, but I can tell you that the Mac is the Bible.
That's what I was coming in. It wasn't about what's my role, it wasn't about what is the power of this field. It was what is the power of the tool. And it took for me to unlearn that, to get to the place that I'm in now. And it looks like you're actually challenging them to begin with that already.
[00:33:46] Speaker B: Yeah, because what is the point of you using a tool if you're harming people with it? And I feel like academic institutions should be ashamed of themselves when they have a person who comes in with racist ideology and leaves with the same racist ideology, never being questioned, never being challenged on that belief about thinking that people are lesser than what are we doing in our classes? I have to think that are we not really seeing them as a holistic person, or are we just dumping information?
What's the point of that? That's not fun.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Yeah, not at all. I hear with the students, and it also sounds like there's opportunity with faculty, staff, administrators. If you look at the education system in its entirety, what would this sector look like if it actually reflected your culture or reflected more of an abolitionist mindset in this space?
[00:34:36] Speaker B: First off, the schedule would not be the way that the schedule is. That would be one thing. There would be such a value on personal time, for sure. I would say, of course, there are so many things that would be free at the institution. Right. You're already paying intuition. Food needs to be free. I shouldn't have to buy a separate meal thing for that. Books should be free. I try to make sure that's the case in all my classes. And so I would say there's a lot of accessibility things that I'd be looking at, for sure. I'd like to find a way to break down this barrier that faculty have with students. I do this all the time with students of color. I just don't know how the institution will take it to do it with all students. Because with students of color, there's, like, a reason behind it. Right. You're like, I have to build a personal relationship to even keep you here, to even keep you going, because you're the only black student in this whole class or whatever. So I want to find a way to really create a mentor relationship with students. So that right now I'm going out tomorrow with some students of color in that mentor relationship for lunch, and the university is paying for it. Why is there not already a system in place for that, for other students who are coming in? So they can build that? Because if we're building people holistically again, they are not just seeing us in the classroom. They have to see how we are out in the world. And so that's when I think that the real on hand learning begins. It's like I'm sitting here ordering my lunch. What am I doing in my interaction with the waiter? All of these things that we expect, it's like, oh, people just learn that? Where do they learn it from? And it's like if we are building those people, we're holistically looking at them. We have to see them and they have to see us in different scenarios. And I would love it if there was an opportunity for more out of classroom learning experiences rather than just that whole like, oh, I'm here in front of a room talking to you.
[00:36:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's power even in the idea of experiential learning. And also, like you said, the connectivity between the professor or the guest speakers and the students, some people look at it through the lens of just like, networking. But the reality is that, again, I go back to what you said in the beginning of this conversation. You don't know. I don't know either. Let's set a foundation with one another to actually get to know how we are both learning and unlearning together in this process. It's kind of like in my position, I tell people all the time prior to creative reaction, I had never been a president and CEO. I had to learn that. But guess what? Being a president CEO today is completely different than being a president CEO three weeks ago because every day is different. So I am learning every day. I am unlearning every day. And it's the same with this group of students that you're working with. Hey, we just met each other. Just because I may have taught this class. I may have taught this class 15 times at this point, but every class will be different because you're different and I'm different because yes has changed. Yes.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: I love that. And you're killing it. By the way, as a president CEO, I just wanted to say thank you.
[00:37:32] Speaker A: I appreciate that. So I'm curious. You have agency creative director. You also co author of books, you're also a professor, but some folks may or may not know. You are also in a journey of trying to get a doctorate of philosophy and social justice education because hey, what's time? Yeah, on top of that, we rollerblade.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: What's another degree? You know what I'm saying? I'm bored. Let me just skip PhD.
[00:37:57] Speaker A: Look, I tell people all the time, I would love to have a PhD. I just need a nice honorary degree.
[00:38:02] Speaker B: Look, listen, if you could do it, do it then. No shade, no tea, no shade, nothing.
[00:38:09] Speaker A: But I'm curious with you. Talk a little bit about the research that you're doing under your PhD work and also how do you see that kind of promoting racial justice in the academic realm?
[00:38:21] Speaker B: Absolutely. It literally is doing just that. My research dissertation is called Black Liberation by Design. And what I hope to do. I actually came into the PhD program like, why can't I just write a book? And that be my dissertation? And they were like, no, you have to write dissertation. So my dissertation is about the research required for me to understand black liberation, anti blackness, the broader system of the whole world. But to be able to take that as a new lens of black liberation and to apply that to Graphic Design Foundational courses. So what I'm trying to do is, yes, this is a Dismantling project. How can I dismantle the current canon of graphic design? How are we teaching it? How are we thinking about teaching it? What are the theories and pedagogical approaches, the curriculum that we're doing? And then how can I take my research and then apply it so that we are creating these pedagogical approaches that support black liberation, and that the projects focus on counter storytelling and understanding the black experience in a way that's beneficial for our communities, and that students who are non black can also see themselves in that. And we talk about black liberation, we should be able to see other folks in that. They should be able to play a role in that. And so that's what I would like to do out of the end of this PhD journey for me, I get my dissertation done, then I'm finishing up or writing this book, curricular models that then professors can take on and literally teach a student graphic design. I'm teaching you how to do this, but from a black liberatory lens. So that includes all the things that I've been doing already in the practice, right? Like positionality, context, all of these community agreements. But then also here are the black liberatory projects. Here's how you can teach Adobe Photoshop using black liberatory projects. Here's how you can teach Illustrator, InDesign, XV, whatever, using black liberatory projects. And so for me, it's really just about creating new subject matter that's not just like, oh, create an ice cream shop. Okay, let's create a black liberatory ice cream shop. What does that look like? Oh, well, maybe it's lactate free because so many black people are lactose intolerant. It's just little things like that. I want people to be able to think of things a little bit deeper than just like, oh, I want to create a really cool smash up of an ice cream cone and an elephant. No, let's create something that means things. And so that's what my PhD project is about. And I've created these three projects. And this fall, I'm having professors run the projects in their classes to see how it works for them, how the students perceive it and take it so I can make any changes and finish up this dissertation. Because we're trying to be done.
[00:40:53] Speaker A: Come on. Here's why you heard me say honorary and not go back.
Can I just say how dope that actually is in itself but what I also love about what you just said is it's action oriented, right? My work is very deep in equity, right? We could talk about racial equity, gender equity, equity as it relates to religion, like equity across multiple identities, right? And the work of equity is still stuck in this theoretical space.
And when I hear you talk about the work of your dissertation, even the work that you're doing on the ground in the classroom, the know, the agency, even your own exhibits, which we actually didn't talk about, but if you haven't, just check out some of the exhibits that Therese has done. It's amazing.
Some of them I actually have on my wall in my house. And it's all action oriented. So I'd love for you to talk about what does equity and action look like in your sector? Is it the black liberatory work? Like, are you developing one of the frameworks to get us more towards action around equity in the field of education? Or are there some good examples of equity being applied that we should highlight in this space?
[00:42:01] Speaker B: You know what? I hadn't even really thought about my work being like this action based thing, because the reason why I'm saying that is because I haven't even imagined somebody's impactful work not being about action. And so for me, when I think about being in the equity space, when you are just in the theoretical, which a lot of faculty are, you are in the performative, you are in the making. The black post on Instagram talking about, I support black lives, like, that's you and hopefully that's not where you want to stay. And so for me, I think in creating anything, even with racism at Taught, we couldn't just go around telling faculty, you need to start talking about race in your classroom. No, we created this toolkit that you can actually use and move through your classroom throughout the whole semester, having students intentionally think about what oppressive design looks like and trying to create and reimagine that in a design approach that could work as their semester end project. And so for me and for us in that project, it has always been about action. It has always been about learning. And then let's apply it like you have to do that or you will stay stagnant. And we all know that when you learn something, you only really learn it when you actually begin to then use it and also teach it out. So I'll have points in my class where I have students actually teach out something that they've learned around some of these topics. And so that, again, ingrains it in them, they begin to actually say, oh, I've learned this thing. And so it has to be action based. Everything that I have to do that I do has to be in that way. It can't just be. When I think about the differences between art and design, I have exhibitions but they are action based. And so for me, they're design exhibitions, right? Because it's an intentional piece. That's the difference, right? Art is, like, for art's sake. And then design is, like, intentional. You're trying to visually communicate something. And for me, it always has to be about, then let's get to work. I think that's just me overall, as a person who works and gets stuff done. But when we talk about equity, I want to see change in my lifetime. And so that means providing things which people can actually actively engage with, take on, and use as one of the tools in their toolbox and be able to pull out at any moment's notice, to be able to continue on this fight for equity and change.
[00:44:12] Speaker A: And what I hear about the design, because I work with artists and designers, I ain't about to have no artists come and take me out. Because I'm like, how dare she? But what I hear about it is this idea of it being participatory and also this idea of moving beyond the space itself, right? Not only just conversation, but what are the action, what are the tools, what are the methodologies, what are the approaches, what are the interventions beyond what we are seeing in this one gallery experience, which I think is very powerful and very important. And that's why even when I go know the Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, and I go to different museums, sometimes I'm going there just to get inspired or really kind of understanding of what happened in that culture, in that time, through that person's lens. What does it look like to have a multi way conversation with the piece itself in the space and outside of the space? So I'm curious, what's one of your biggest I don't know right now. I have no idea. And you said it a bit when you start your classroom. But I'm curious. Is there, like, one thing that you're.
[00:45:17] Speaker B: Like, I don't know individually that I don't know is I don't know what's after this, after I do these two books and I finish my dissertation and I get tenure, because Sister is going to get tenure, I don't know what's next. I've been working with my therapist. She's like, you need to sit in the achievement, right? Because that's what we do as black women. We just work, get it done, and get it done, and you need to sit in it. And so for me, I'm like, what is next? Because the movement doesn't stop, right? And so I'm like, how can I plug in in a way where I am not just focusing on achievement and getting things done? Because I feel like a lot of that is like tenure culture, too. You're like, you have to get these things right. And so what does that look like for me, as someone who doesn't have to work toward tenure and can just create and do for my community, for community's sake, what does that look like? So that's probably the biggest I don't know. For me, individually, I would say when I think about collectively, the I don't know, that's like, everything I think about collective liberation, and I'm like, it looks like this for me, and it looks like this for this other person I know, but I have no idea what that looks like. And so for me, it was daunting maybe, like, three or four years ago to think about OOH collective liberation. And for me to think about that was like, oh, my gosh, that's almost scary because it's, like, so much now. I'm like, I want to open the door in the pitch dark and find the light and turn it on. That's where I'm at right now. I'm at this place where I don't know, but I'm so curious that it's like, I have to know. And so I'm going to keep working toward it, right? Because I want us to eventually get there or see some glimpse of it. But I think that the collective I don't know is like, liberation. I have no clue what that looks like for us in this world, in this day and time where they can announce aliens is here and don't nobody care because we got rent due. I mean, I have no idea, right, what liberation looks like outside of that. So that's the collective one, I think.
[00:47:02] Speaker A: True. Roars. Like I said, my work is in equity, right? And I tell people all the time, we've never had it. We've never had an society. There's some folks we work with, some youth, we work with some clients, and they're like, no, we can't share it until we have it figured out. I'm like, no one hasn't figured out.
We are literally trying to learn while building, while doing. There is no roadmap. We are luckily in a position to really think about how we could create different roadmaps, but we're not there. So the reason I've been ending the conversations like this, because I can't have a podcast around reimagine redesigning and not require you to reimagine and redesign, even in this space of theory, right? So let's imagine we're in the year 21 23. So 100 years from now, like you say, aliens might be here, so who knows? We might be there, but we're in the year 21 23. What's different about the world? How has it been reimaginedly designed to give you or your descendants what they need for joy and liberation?
[00:48:07] Speaker B: I'm going to talk through it, because one of the reasons why I think it's hard for me to imagine because I think the work that we're doing is so urgently needed right now that it's hard for us to not be in the present. Like, I have to be in the present all the time. And so it is really hard to think about 100 years from now. What does that look like? What kinds of laws are they passing? What sorts of policies are in place even at my academic institution? What I could hope for at a foundational level is that people don't hate black people.
And the reason I say that is because the reason why something like the educational institution is so inaccessible as far as tuition is because they didn't want black people to benefit from a free education.
The reason why health care is so inaccessible and people don't want free health care is because they didn't want black people to benefit from free health care. I would imagine we could actually see what Liberation looks like as a collective and for all of us, if people just could value us in our own humanity and understand that when they do that it actually values themselves, they see themselves, and that they could actually then work towards better outcomes for their lives if they stopped hating other people so much. Their love for themselves needs to be greater than the hate that they have for us. And it's like, at this point, their hate for us is greater than the way that they even love themselves. And I think that there's a lot of systemic things that we could talk about with that. But I would honestly say I think there's, like, just a lot of turning inward that needs to happen that I would love to see, and I would love for people to not hate themselves and really base the decisions that we make in love and overall collective health for our communities.
Yeah. And I don't know what that like. I can't give you a tangible thing about what that looks like, but I would just imagine I can imagine what it would take to get there at a place where people who aren't me can see me as someone like themselves, profound as.
[00:50:16] Speaker A: You. Thank you. Thank you, Teresa, for this great conversation. I am just completely in awe of you, and I'm excited to see what you're going to do next after you sit in it as your therapist.
You know, they say to tell other people what you can't do yourself.
You are, as always, doing great work that's changing the world for the betterment of all of us. And I want you to always find the space to also sit in your own liberation.
[00:50:44] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:50:45] Speaker A: Thank you for joining me on the Reimagine redesign podcast. It's been an honor. Dam.
