Diaspora by Design: Migration, Mills and Interiors
Dr Sabrina Rahman, AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship
By the end of the nineteenth century, textile mills were ubiquitous in industrial regions throughout the Global North. While the wider cultural, economic and political implications of these mills have led directly to the establishment of the history of design as a discipline, to date there has been little to no attention paid to their diasporic communities, and how migrant experiences shaped practices of modern interior design. By focusing on the regional working-class cities of Bradford, Paterson and Bad Vöslau, this project will uncover the relationship between vernacular and global interior design. Situated within the fields of design history, social history and diaspora studies, the research and its associated development and engagement activities deploy an intersectional approach in order to consider how new approaches to vernacular design developed through processes of migration and acculturation.
The research asks the following questions:
- How have the diasporic communities fostered in the textile mills of Bradford, Paterson and Bad Vöslau turned to interior design—including domestic spaces, local cultural centres, eateries and shops—as a means of cultivating a collective identity?
- What do the interiors created within these communities tell us about issues of class, gender, race and ethnicity in sites that have been defined as peripheral or non-existent in the history of modern design?
- How do such sites inform a visual and haptic history from below that focuses on the vernacular culture of migration, and the intersections of regional identity and cosmopolitanism within wider discourses of decoloniality and pluriversality?
- How can engagement result in community self-empowerment and the development of community-led methodologies in design and cultural history?
Project activities are based around accessible, movement-based workshops with community members, intended to activate a multisensory experience of everyday life in the diaspora. Key outputs include an international symposium on design history and embodied research at the University of Exeter, and an edited collection on site-specific practices of diaspora.
