Seeing Through Languages 

Using language as a lens to complicate pedagogical practice, my talk questions neutrality and implicit biases in teaching and examines the sometimes unconscious submission to the hegemony of English and the enduring legacies of colonial powers.

Language is entangled with the practice of design and teaching as both an instructional medium and material to create with, but it is also burdened with various forms of supremacies. Rey Chow, in her discussion of languaging as a postcolonial experience, describes it as a “double disfigurement,” where language tone, akin to skin tone, is “a defective correction of something already deemed defective”. Speaking the language of whiteness becomes an unattainable proxy to the unattainable whiteness. I will share observations and pedagogical interventions that utilize language as a lens to decenter colonial episteme, and ways of attending to polyphony and dissonance in classrooms as sites of generative learning.

Li, Xinyi. “Seeing Through Languages: Pedagogical Interventions in Transcultural and Translingual Contexts”  Paper presented at the AIGA National Conference, Design Educators Community Symposium Lens, New York, October 12th, 2023