Report: DHS Affiliated Society Panel: 114th CAA Annual Conference, Chicago Hilton, February 18–21, 2026

Reports

14 May, 2026 -

Design Activism as Repetition, Reconstruction and Reinvention

Alex J. Todd reports on the DHS affiliated society panel he co-chaired with Harriet Atkinson at the 114th CAA conference in Chicago, US in February 2026.

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The panel 'Design Activism as Repetition, Reconstruction and Reinvention' responded to themes that have emerged in the research of both Harriet and myself, regarding the political practice of art and design, as well as in our co-leadership of the ‘Design Activism’ strand of the Centre for Design History at the University of Brighton, UK.

Central to the panel was the examination of the ways in which forms, methods, and narratives recur in design activism. Design activism—defined in this instance as the practice of using images, objects, and type as tools in support of political action—is a distinctly referential process, through which historical citation can situate one struggle’s alignment, or misalignment, with another (Sholette, 2021; Huyssen, 2003). The panel thus addressed the adaptations, continuities, and slippages that occur in design activism across differing times, spaces, and cultures.

Thanks to the generous support of the DHS, the panel included four speakers: Aurore Damoiseaux (University of Brighton, UK), Lauren A. McQuiston (University of Virginia, US), Ghia Haddad (Independent Researcher and Artist, UAE), and Hoyee Tse (London Metropolitan University, UK).

Aurore Damoiseaux, an AHRC-Techne funded PhD student at the University of Brighton, presented her research on the use of clothing and handmade textile objects as protest tools to imagine alternative means of living at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Berkshire, UK (1981–2000). Damoiseaux spoke on the role of ‘craftivism’ and creative sartorial choices in evoking historical social movements—such as the miners’ strikes and the Women’s Liberation movement. In recalling, and repeating, traditions of craft- and textile-related protest tactics, members of the peace camp sought to embed their cause within a longer lineage of UK activism. Beyond her focus on the nineteen year life of the camp itself, Damoiseaux also traced the ways in which its forms of activism have created their own legacy and are now being reinvented by artists such as Ellen Lesperance.

Lauren A. McQuiston, a designer, educator, and PhD student in the University of Virginia School of Architecture, presented her analysis of ‘Before Whitney’ (1985), an exhibition organised by Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City. As McQuiston described, the exhibition was conceived as a response to the Whitney Museum of American Art’s proposition of an addition to be designed by Michael Graves. For McQuiston, Storefront’s exhibition-making process—which presented artists, designers, and architects, with an image of the Whitney plot with Graves’ planned addition removed—served as an instance of institutional critique, inviting contributors to redraw and reimagine the space, creating a counter-archive of the design process. In addition, McQuiston argued that the exhibition’s presentation of the repetitive reconstruction of the Whitney plot acted as a means through which Storefront could situate the debate over the Whitney’s future within broader histories of ‘American architectural nationalism, aesthetic judgement, and cultural exclusion.’

The third paper, presented by Ghia Haddad, an independent researcher and artist based in Dubai, UAE, focused on ‘tatreez’, a form of traditional Palestinian embroidery. As Haddad argued, the repetition of tatreez, as a model for making, across geographic, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries, exemplifies a freedom of movement often withheld from Palestinian peoples. For Haddad, tatreez, in this regard, must be seen as a ‘decolonial design strategy’ that resists the politics of erasure: ‘It reclaims authorship, reorients heritage as insurgent archive, and demonstrates how continuity can perform cultural repair within conditions of rupture.’ Such pluriversal methods of design activism, Haddad suggested, carry the claim of Palestinian identity into new publics.

The final paper of the panel was presented by Hoyee Tse, a PhD student at London Metropolitan University, UK, and a recipient of the Vice Chancellor’s Doctoral Scholarship. Tse’s paper investigated the ways in which participants of the 2019–2020 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong reconstructed and reinvented, in a contemporary context, the established revolutionary emblem of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. As Tse highlighted, what were once flags and rifles became helmets and umbrellas, articulating the shifted socio-political discourses to which the image was now responding. These ‘visual reconfigurations’, for Tse, speak to both the continuities and the ruptures in vernaculars of design activism: ‘the allegorical structure of the visual symbol persists but its “vocabulary” is fractured and reshaped.’ Tse argued that the use of allegory—referring here to Walter Benjamin’s conception of the term as a means of radical political intervention—in such images served to legitimize the resistance of Hong Kongers as part of a historical lineage of anti-state revolt.

What came across most clearly across these four papers, and the discussion that followed, was the centrality of the archive, as both a literal and metaphorical means through which the methods and meanings of design activism are negotiated. In the papers of both Damoiseaux and Tse, the archive represented a form of ‘originary’ text (Foster, 1996), which is then reworked and recontextualized in order to reclaim its meaning in different circumstances. In the papers of McQuiston and Haddad, on the other hand, we see the emergence of a counter-archive, or ‘insurgent’ archive, that functions as a kind of refusal or resistance through repetition. These archival layers of design activism—which can be read like stacks of tracing paper, one atop the other—reveal the fluctuating outlines of a continuous set of ideas and motifs that have defined historical struggles.  In our contemporary moment, such repetitions, reconstructions, and reinventions, may keep us alert to the longevity, adaptability, and possibilities, of these struggles that continue around the globe.