LINK 2022 4th Conference in Creative Practice, Research and Global South

It is increasingly overwhelming that our societies are living in disintegrating environments and need for more sustainable design approaches and wiser ways of living and being. Anthropogenic design impact in corporate spheres is causing socio-ecological destruction that threatens the underpinnings of civilisation and bio-diverse nature. Hence, economies and life worlds are facing the limitations of narratives of progress and creeds of growth with their designs and actions that are inapposite to the flourishing of life on our planet. In this context that the LINK Conference has emerged. LINK is a research group created from reflections we always had about our actions as educators, researchers, and practitioners in the field of Art and Design. Over the last few years, we have noticed that such concerns have remained while they have multiplied, diversified, and become more complex. The more we dialogued with people worldwide, especially from the so-called “Global South”, the more we realised that these same issues were also dear to our colleagues, albeit with their colours and contours. The intensification of globalisation and commodities fostered by markets and technology has led today’s critical theorists to advocate for new kinds of engagement between Art, Design and the world. Not coincidentally, the last decades saw significant contributions to Art and Design Research in the Global South and Indigenous contexts, where inquiry is situated within an intelligent and intelligible world of natural systems, replete with relational patterns for being in the world. Indigenising methodologies centre the production of knowledge around Art and Design processes and pieces of epistemologies derived from Indigenous Cultures. The relationships between researchers, practitioners and practice are being challenged and redefined, empowering Indigenous peoples to collect, analyse, interpret, and control research data instead of simply participating in projects as subjects. These shifting orientations and approaches respond for the decolonisation of research in higher education institutions and research methodologies employed by academics. Art and Design can help to transform obsolete social and economic practices into novel forms of life or living a meaningful life, thus replacing anthropo-centric Design for more pluriversal and transformational approaches beyond apocalyptical visions and dystopia. LINK Conference focuses on ways of knowing that inform research and methods involving Art and Design Research in the Global South and Indigenous contexts . LINK 2022 will challenge emerging themes, new epistemologies, and the multiple relationships between theory and practice (if such a distinction can be made). This recipe has consolidated as a sort of amalgam of LINK Conference. In its 4th edition, LINK 2022 celebrates the relationship between practice-led Art and Design research, Global South and Indigenous world views, fostering cognitive shifts to address twenty-first-century issues and the creation of inclusive communities that emphasise the interconnectedness (physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual) between people and landscapes. We hope you enjoy the reading.