W.E.B. Du Bois and Designs for Abolition Democracy

Abstract

Scholars and activists have reintroduced the notion of abolition to public consciousness in recent decades, but it has roots in the activist scholarship and practice of W.E.B. Du Bois on “abolition democracy.” Design has not often been seen in relationship to this tradition, in part because designers contribute to making the very systems, sites, materials, or mechanisms that abolitionist-oriented efforts oppose; for instance, those that sustain mass surveillance, incarceration, and containment. In Du Bois’s approach, however, it is also evident that there is potential for design to participate in envisioning and creating conditions for abolition democracy. In order to clarify some generative relations between design and abolition democracy, this article outlines some aspects of the theory and practice of abolition democracy from Du Bois’s writings on the Reconstruction Era, applying them to the present. It argues for the relevance of designing for abolition democracy, historically and for action today, while also pointing to the potential for emerging design practices to learn from the models of action and thought that Du Bois offers.

Keywords:

• W.E.B. Du Bois
• abolition democracy
• social design
• design for transitions

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Note that this not meant to be a thorough review of Du Bosian or abolitionist thought in relation to design, but rather a provocation of potential ways that these traditions can and do overlap, with Du Bois as a key model.

2 Du Bois’s projects entailed designing in Manzini’s definition of project-making from the perspective of design and social innovation. Manzini describes the relationship between project-making and designing this way: “a project is a sequence of conversations about the world, the aim of which is to bring it closer to the way we would like it to be. Doing this entails designing: making a critical evaluation of the state of things, imagining how we would like them to be, and having the necessary relational system at hand to transform them—and all of this in terms of both their practical functioning (problem-solving) and their meaning (sense-making)” (Manzini 2019, 37–8).

3 According to Morris (2017, 188): “Liberation capital is a form of capital used by oppressed and resource-starved scholars to initiate and sustain the research program of a nonhegemonic scientific school. It consists of volunteer or nominally paid labor in research and other scholarly activities that are provided by a self-conscious group of professionals and amateur intellectual workers for a subaltern school of thought that seeks to challenge the intellectual foundations of oppression. The providers of liberation capital, most often members of the oppressed group, work together to formulate new research methodologies that facilitate the collection and analysis of critical evidence leading to new theoretical perspectives on the social conditions faced by the oppressed group, as well as programmatic innovations to be used as weapons of liberation.”

4 As I describe elsewhere (DelSesto 2022), this means one model for designing may be radical and engaged pedagogies, in which interventions are scaffolded towards growing shared participation in the imagination and creation of new knowledge and spaces.

5 For more on the “question of history” in design and designing today, see Fry’s argument for the need to revive the historical in/of designs, or to reconceive historicity in designing, for the present (Fry 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew DelSesto

Matthew DelSesto is Coordinator of the Initiative for Community Justice and Engaged Pedagogy and faculty in the Sociology Department at Boston College. [email protected]