Victor Udoewa
Learnings from Black Liberation System Entanglements Part III
Many community groups and organisations hire a social impact designer, systems specialist, or futurist to help create a more prosperous, flourishing future. However, the designer or futurist often creates a future the community doesn’t want or own, and any initiative created from the work either leaves the current situation unchanged, worsened, or only temporarily advanced or resolved. Many futurist tools do not work for underutilised communities.
This session is an invitation to engage in discussion about how futures have been practised by communities, especially by oppressed people and decolonial movements. Then, viewing futures and design as spiritual practices, we use a Black Liberation Theology lens, informed by other intersectional liberation theologies, to critique and decolonise White futures practice. We then discuss how we, in Black and underutilised communities, practice futurism, guiding our systems practice in social justice work. Instead of a common, Eurocentric design approach based on our sense of agency, motivated by optimism and hope, this approach is based on hopelessness and true impossibility that, paradoxically, moves us forward.
Part I and Part II
Learnings from Black Liberation System Entanglements: A decolonial healing-centered approach Part I
[Abstract excerpt] this paper describes different decolonial types of trauma responses from a Black liberationist perspective and shares an understanding of system traps as trauma responses of the ego-preserving (un)conscious system. Our justice work is to be system stewards, or trauma stewards, walking alongside the system towards healing. These are learnings we, in the Indigenous and transgenerational Black liberation movements, already have, embody, carry, and through which we tell stories to the systemic design community to facilitate inter-ontological and inter-epistemic conversation. This is the first in a short series of papers to explore updated Black liberation adverse system entanglements (or traps), movements (not interventions), and praxeology (instead of methodology).
Learnings from Black Liberation System Entanglements Part II: Our experience of system traps
In this Contexts article, Part II, Victor Udoewa delves deeper into the harmful, context-specific system entanglements that justice workers encounter and encourages system healing-centered approaches. He identifies 15 entanglements, beginning with Neocolonialism and progressing through Institutionalizing Movements, Mythologising Mythology, Protest-Campaign-Movement Discontinuity, and an examination of justice approaches that can inadvertently entangle us in injustice. Victor leaves one negative system entanglement for Part III—misreading the system.
PROFILE
Victor Udoewa
Digital Services | Health Equity
Victor Udoewa began his career designing and developing computational tools for scientific applications before shifting his focus to the social impact sector and ICT for Development, both in community and international contexts. He is a dedicated practitioner and advocate of participatory design, a meta-methodology he has applied across service and system design for governments, multilateral institutions, nonprofits, for-profits, and communities. Victor is committed to bringing practices such as positive deviance, pluriversal methods, and systems practice into civic design. Through initiatives such as Justice by Design and an equity-centred meetup group, he advances work to decolonise design and embed equity within practice. He is also actively involved in the systemic design community, contributing as a speaker and writer, and publishing Part I of his extensive research project, Learnings from Black Liberation System Entanglements, with RSD12 and Part II with Contexts—The Systemic Design Journal.
Victor can also be found teaching salsa, singing with his a cappella group, volunteering as a health trauma and crisis counsellor, or spending time with his family.
