Decolonisation, Liberation & Design: Reimagination as a tool for Collective Healing

What does it mean to decolonise design and research?How can design become an act of liberation, truth-telling, and collective healing rather than extraction or control?.💛 This is a tender, layered conversation. We invite you to listen gently, pause when needed, and hold yourself with care as you move through these reflections..In this episode of our Healing Series, we speak with Pause and Effect, a decolonial design and research studio working to regenerate ways of being, knowing, and doing.🎙️ In this conversation, we explore:🔹 Everyday practices of decolonisation beyond vocabulary🔹 Healing as relational and collective, rooted in grief, joy, and remembering🔹 How coloniality shapes knowledge creation and design🔹 Resisting assimilation and reclaiming ancestral wisdom🔹 Design’s role in reimagining systems for liberation🌸 About our guests:🌟 Sabrina MeherallySabrina (she/they) is the Founder and Change Alchemist at Pause and Effect. After more than a decade as a practicing designer, researcher, HR business partner and product manager, Sabrina poured her spirit and resources into building a brand that proudly lives into its values with integrity.Sabrina is the descendant of Sindhi Muslim Gujarati ancestors who, through forced migration, found home in East Africa and later, in so-called Canada. She brings their lessons of survival through collective care and communal responsibility into her vision for flourishing futures.Outside of Pause and Effect, Sabrina satiates her imagination through sci-fi. She helps cultivate and tend to the Moberly Medicine Garden, and is co-establishing a mutual aid fieldhouse called the Earthseed Collective, with the mission of increasing community climate resilience and food sovereignty through culturally-rooted programming.Above all things, Sabrina is an Auntie who cares deeply about the world her niblings will inherit.🌟 Sahibzada MayedSahibzada Mayed is a Change Alchemist at Pause and Effect, bringing an extensive background of community-based participatory design, emancipatory research, and trauma-centered practice.Mayed comes from a lineage of ancestors who tended to their native lands and waters as a primary form of sustenance and survival. Due to colonial violence and forced displacement, these relationships have been severed over multiple generations and cycles of loss.Their identity is shaped by their background as a Muslim immigrant of Persian, Afghan, Indian, and Pakistani heritage, as well as lived experiences of queerness, disability, and neurodivergence. Unravelling the work of colonization has led them through a process of reconciliation and remembrance.Mayed leads a fashion startup, Naranji, that is working toward disrupting the gender binary and reclaiming cultural fashion. As a multi-disciplinary creative, Mayed has produced multiple exhibitions and runway shows, with work featured across Japan, Pakistan, Thailand, and the United States.Mayed’s work and practice are rooted in principles of abolition and transformative justice. They wake up every day with a heartful commitment to be a better future ancestor.Together, Sabrina and Mayed invite us to move beyond extractive design and research practices, towards knowledge creation as remembrance, relationality, and liberation..#healing #decolonisation #liberation #design #research #knowledge #systemschange .Music from #Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/pecan-pie/sweetness-of-the-momentLicense code: 5PUTOKYZWIO99ABD.Music by Oleg Fedak from Pixabay.