Colonial histories, museum collections, FabLabs and community engagement: flows of practices, cultures and people – A roundtable

This roundtable explores how issues of the local and the global register and are negotiated in the disciplines of art history and design with regard to two projects: Suits and Saris by Amy Jane Barnes (Art History) and La Campana Community FabLab by Nicole Lotz (Design). It seeks to probe what such a transdisciplinary discussion might entail and what the differences and similarities in our approaches might be. The discussion aimed at enriching our practice by stepping out of familiar frames of professional reference and becoming familiar with perspectives and discourses from the related but also disciplinarily distant fields of art history and design respectively, which, moreover, at the Open University are embedded in the humanities and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and therefore inhabit distinctly different vocational worlds.