"Divergent Models" new episodes of the Reverberations podcast series by Zara Arshad in collaboration with the DHS are now live!

24 June 2021

The Design History Society is proud to announce the launch of the second series of Reverberations podcasts by Zara Arshad!

The Reverberations podcast was created to discuss marginalisation, underrepresentation and erasure in the UK’s cultural and creative sectors. Organised around three key themes - “institutions”, “divergent models”, and “decolonising design and culture” - season one of the podcast broadly focuses on history making, particularly in relation to design history. The conversations that feature implicitly reflect on how and where our histories have conventionally been told, and who gets to tell them through considering the work and experiences of BIPOC peers and colleagues, who have navigated, continue to navigate, and frequently resist institutional structures and frameworks in varying ways.

“We cannot decolonise what was never ours to begin with - but we can always create. When we face the past we understand the present. In understanding the present, we shape our future” - Decolonising the Archive

The second group of podcasts Divergent Models highlights the work of those who operate outside of traditional (institutional) structures - those who are rallying their own networks to form independent collectives and bottom-up initiatives. In this set of conversations, Zara Arshad talks to Vivien Chan (co-founder of the Hong Kong Design History Network), Debika Ray (writer, editor, and founder of Clove magazine), and Etienne Joseph (co-founder of Decolonising the Archive).

Stay tuned for the third theme of the first season, Decolonising Design and Culture!