Rachel Kantrowitz

What if the most transformative design work begins by asking: whose knowledge counts, whose futures matter, and whose ways of knowing are deemed legitimate? This session introduces epistemic dignity as an approach to ethical design that recognizes knowledge-making as a site not only of power and violence, but also of imagination and liberation. There’s another way forward, and many of us are already on that path. Designing for epistemic dignity is a process that is reciprocal rather than extractive, intersectional rather than exclusionary, regenerative rather than linear. Drawing on postcolonial theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, social epistemology, Marxism, and Afrofuturism, this talk takes as its point of departure the fact that mainstream design practices — often packaged as innovation — frequently appropriate non-Western, Indigenous, and marginalized ways of knowing while erasing their origins and perpetuating colonial logic. When we properly attribute and understand these epistemes, we make erasures visible and reject appropriations. By continuing to expand the ways of knowing we incorporate in our work and cultivating this community of practice, we then see how Western concepts like "empathy" and "participatory design" or the now-popular concept of “both/and” are not new. Rather, they are rediscoveries of communal, relational, and non-binary epistemologies that colonialism systematically suppressed. In health and medicine, this erasure is particularly acute: Western medical paradigms have historically exploited and excluded people of color, while marginalizing Indigenous healing practices and communal care models. Capitalist narratives co-opt wellness as an individual commodity, obscuring structural determinants of health. By decentering singular, linear narratives and embracing plural pasts and contingent futures, epistemic dignity provides a unifying ethical framework for our current moment. Participants will leave with principles to apply and provocative questions to reflect on for embedding epistemic dignity into their work.