Since 2020 and all which that year brought up, I have been emphasising collaborative work as a research principle. This means working on innovative methods for collective history writing and producing histories underpinned by a plurality of voices, positionality, and reflexivity that will lead to a more diverse and inclusive discipline.

This work is currently manifested in three key research activities. As a co-founder of the research collective OPEN (with Sarah Cheang, Katie Irani and Shehnaz Suterwalla), we have been exploring new models for working collectively with history and memory. Prompted by a series of visual collages co-created by the authors, OPEN’s 2023 article is structured around a dialogue between the authors that contributes to contemporary discussions at the intersections of gender and critical race studies, postcolonialism, decoloniality, and cultural studies as they are presented through material and visual culture, literature, and poetry.

As a member of the Decolonial Design History Educators Network —aka InterDesining Network—I have been funded by a grant from the Australian Council of University Art & Design Schools (ACUADS) to create connections between educators in Australasia, collect and share experiences of implementing key teaching and learning activities around positionality, locality, plurality in the classroom. Recently formed, the InterDesining Network (Nicola St John (RMIT), Fanny Suhendra (Swinburne), Livia Rezende (UNSW), Diana Albarrán González (University of Auckland), Nina Gibbes, Zenobia Ahmed (RMIT)) has already attracted further funding for its core activities; it will hold its website launch and outreach events in late 2023.

As Editor of the Journal of Design History with special responsibility for Explorations, I have been co-leading with A/Prof. Jane Tynan (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) a new strategic editorial direction underpinned by EDI principles. Explorations aims to support experimentation in scholarly communication, collaborative writing and interdisciplinarity and widen publishing access to authors underrepresented in the field.