In this blog I have developed a critical reflection of an artefact that can be used as an intellectual property teaching resource across UAL that highlights the issues surrounding cultural appropriation within education. I am a recent graduate of MA Fashion Design Management at LCF and now work as an Intellectual Property (IP) [1] Educator at UAL [2]. There are a multitude of ways to define IP and I have chosen the definition from Roxanne Peters ‘IP law reflects the authorship and ownership of any creative, innovative and cultural capital of an individual and their impact on and for society’ (2022). The approach of the IP Education team that I work in is underpinned by a duty of care to support our creative community through educating about why IP matters, what and who is being represented and who benefits.  

My artefact –  

The artefact is creating a video interview of a student sharing their personal understanding and experiences of cultural appropriation from the perspective of intellectual property (IP). Table 1 outlines the planned structure for the video. I chose to focus on cultural appropriation as historically IP has been taught to business and law students based on colonial enterprise being Western-centric in governance and application. Teaching IP to creatives at UAL must be driven by graduate experiences, personal values and cultural capital. Hence, developing a critical understanding of cultural appropriation is central to the future development of UAL’s fashion designers and others. There is a huge amount of work to still to be done in decolonising legal education across different specialisms. Silbey outlines that the role of OP today is much ‘more than markets and money… what it means to be treated equally and with dignity’ (2020).  

Topic focus  Interview questions 
Understanding cultural appropriation in fashion How might you define ‘cultural appropriation’? What is your experience of cultural appropriation?  
Experiences of communities that have been exploited  Are there any examples that you can share of cultural appropriation in fashion? What has the impact on your community been following these experiences?  
Appropriation within fashion education  What is your experience of fashion education, and do you think that cultural appropriation is something that is discussed?  If you were to consider what needs to change in fashion education regarding appropriation what would it be?  
Approaches to tackle cultural appropriation Do you think that it is possible to provide a ‘solution’ to issues such as these you have discussed?  Are there any preventative steps such as education and case studies/stories that you think would impact change here?  
Table 1: An outline of the interview topic focuses and key questions asked to the participant.

Developing accessible IP resources is a key pillar of my work this year; resources that can be adopted and utilised by a wide range of different staff members and students. It was important to me to create a resource to facilitate student understanding of cultural identity and misappropriation to inform their future design work.  

My experience in law and understanding of fashion teaching at LCF meant that I was well positioned to consider the introduction of this topic area. As white, privately educated graduate it was central to this piece of work that it wasn’t only my voice, or my research and reading projected in the video. It needed to be driven by others’ personal experiences and reimagined and delivered collaboratively, I needed to showcase these students’ voices as informed by the research of Finnigan (2009). Table 2 demonstrates the series of reflective questions that have been developed as tool to support embedding the video in teaching and learning. This further development of the resource was informed by the feedback from my blogging group meeting in early July 2022 (see below).  

 Reflective questions Reflective prompts  
1 Based on Kat’s experiences how might you evaluate your design process going forward?  You may want to consider what you are inspired by and how it inspires you.  It might be important to think about the different steps involved when you are designing something and how you might build in awareness.  
2 From Kat’s examples of misappropriation of tribal symbols, prints and artefacts what might you take forward about understanding different cultures?  Have you considered whether any of your previous work has been inspired by any similar elements and this impact?  
3 From listening to Kat talk about the experiences of the community she is part of what have you learned about the impact of cultural appropriation? You might want to consider the differences Kat talked about between cultural appropriation and cultural misappropriation.  
Table 2: An outline of the process for embedding the video into wider teaching including reflective questions and prompts.

The development process –

On commencing my PgCert in January 2022 the first article that I read was Dieffenbacher’s ‘Is fashion education guilty of contributing to the problematic discourse around cultural appropriation’ (2018). Dieffenbacher’s primary research findings demonstrated ‘examples of problematic terminology and methods that inadvertently reinforced challenging stereotypes and appropriation within the design process’ (p.32). A useful starting point in my reading but ultimately limited by its lack of diverse and informed options on the subject. Pham (2014) outlines cultural appropriation in fashion as ‘white western domination over and exploitation of culture at the expensive of everyone else (p.8). When I began to further explore existing literature, my focus was two-fold: (1) decolonising arts education and (2) cultural appropriation in fashion education. 

From my experience in legal education, I had an extremely limited understanding of ‘appropriation’ and in all honestly probably even less of an understanding of ‘cultural appropriation’ before starting LCF as a student. It was during my time at LCF that I really began to understand how designers were inspired and where one might look for inspiration. I come from a very academic background so understanding creative processes was new to me. Within my reading and research in this unit is was central to this project for me to consider what identity, ownership and collaboration meant for creative fashion students and how this fitted into understanding and discussing cultural appropriation.  

Following an initial literature review I outlined some aims in creating this artefact: (1) to create a resource underpinned my critical pedagogies that was accessible and could become a central resource for beginning critical conversations around cultural appropriation within fashion (informed by Freire, 1970 and Cowden and Singh, 2013); (2) to facilitate the beginning of a shift in the teaching and understanding of IP through a lens that is not informed by traditional educators and policymakers; and (3) to support the work of UAL teams in decolonising the arts curriculum to ensure a strategy for transformative education.  

Alongside my literature review I sent an email to the IP Education team who work with students on a 121 basis to ask if they had worked with any students to support with cultural appropriation cases. I received several responses from my colleague who kindly introduced me to a few students who were happy to share their experiences with me. From the three graduates and students that I spoke with I chose Kat’s story to tell in my video as I loved the way that she talked about her design process and explained how she worked closely with her tribe leaders in New Zealand to avoid any appropriation of their culture within her designs.  

My experience and feedback –  

Initially, in the early stages of developing my artefact I proposed an enterprise related video to tell the story of a black, disabled UAL graduate in setting up her business. I felt drawn to Lizzie’s story when I first met her through my IP work as it was almost the opposite experience that I had when setting up my own business as a UAL graduate in 2019. Similarly to Lizzie I began to build up freelance consultancy work after graduating but that’s where the similarities in our experiences end. It was from hearing Lizzie’s experiences that I was able to fully appreciate the extent of my privilege. I thought that the enterprising focus of this report could best help me reflect on my positionality but realised that I did not necessarily need to adopt the most obvious route with this assignment. It was important for me to explore something that I would not normally approach and this informed my topic change.  

The initial feedback that I received from Montana suggested I explore how my race affects the social context of my role and pointed me in the direction of Gillborn’s ‘whiteness, critical race theory and education reform’. It was here that I began to consider whether I should shift my focus to the wider reach I could have with the development of new IP resources across UAL by exploring the topic of cultural appropriation. How could I reach a wider audience with my resource and help staff and students develop a critical understanding of a fundamental element of IP?  

Following my tutorial with Montana I met with my blogging group to discuss our artefact progression. It was an extremely useful session which helped me to consider how I might embed a video into curriculum and whether I needed to develop any additional resources in order to facilitate a critical understanding of the topic (see Table 2). My colleagues helped me to understand how the artefact might be used in practice and shared their experiences of creating resources that had not been utilised as well as they could be. My key takeaways from this meeting were:

  1. it is important that this video is not created and then buried and as such there needs to be a strategic plan for creation, promotion and implementation;
  2. in order to truly embed something (based on many experiences of other colleagues) a resource must have a structure and approach for others to easily understand, adopt and use it; and
  3. in order to see real impact from the development of the resource it could be framed as the first step in a series of resources or events on the topic.  

Based on these key takeaways I create some key action points for implementation:  

  1. Write a supporting document to accompany the video which outlines how it can be used and includes some reflective questions to begin discussions.  
  2. Develop a Teaching and Learning Exchange blog post introducing and explaining the resource which could include an interview with Kat who features in the video.  
  3. Consider organising an event that links with this video that would continue the conversations started through hearing Kat’s story.  

Conclusion –  

Overall, designing this artefact has helped me to further understand the underrepresentation of people of colour within IP and how this has created a huge problem of misappropriation and misrepresentation for a wide range of communities. I hope that this resource is the first of many that the IP Education team at UAL can facilitate to enhance further decolonisation of the arts curriculum. I recognise that there is so much more to understanding complex areas of the law than presenting case saw and statutory facts on slides and beginning to tell the stories of underrepresented communities through listening to UAL graduates experiences is one step towards changing this. 

[1] – In this report I have used ‘IP’ to mean ‘Intellectual Property’ rather than ‘Inclusive Practices’ due to the nature of my role at UAL.  

[2] – Link to positionality statement – https://eleanorrockettpgcert.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2022/05/09/ip-positionality-statement/.

References:

  • Cowden, S. and Singh, G. (2013) ‘Acts of knowing: Critical pedagogy in, against and beyond the university’. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.  
  • Decolonising the Arts Curriculum: Perspectives on Higher Education, zine 2, (Autumn 2019). Available at: https://decolonisingtheartscurriculum.myblog.arts.ac.uk. (Accessed on: 20th July 2022).  
  • Dieffenacher, F., (2018) Fashion design pedagogy: Is fashion education guilty of contributing to the problematic discourse around cultural appropriation.  
  • Finnigan, T (2009) ‘Tell Us About It: Diverse student voices in creative practice’, ADCHE Journal 8(2) Available at: https://engagingimagination. files.wordpress.com/2014/03/tell-us-about-it.pdf (Accessed: 20th July 2022). 
  • Freire, 1970 
  • Gibbs, G., (1998) Learning by doing: A guide to a teaching and learning methods. Oxford, Polytechnic: Further Education Unit.  
  • Gillborn, D., (2005) Education policy as an act of white supremacy: whiteness, critical race theory and education reform. Journal of Education Policy, 20:4, pp.485-505.  
  • Peters, R., (2022) From idea to industry: amplifying the voices of the next generation. WIPO Magazine. March 2022.  
  • Pham, M-T., (2003) Fashion’s cultural appropriation debate – pointless! Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.  
  • Pham, M-T., (2014) ‘Fashion’s cultural appropriation debate – pointless’, The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/05/cultural-appropriation-in-fashion-stop-talking-about-it/370826/ (accessed on 20th July 2022).  
  • Silbey, J., (2020) Intellectual Property in the 21st century will be shaped by the values of justice and equality. News@Northeasten. Available at: https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/10/14/intellectual-property-in-the-21st-century-will-be-shaped-by-values-of-justice-and-equality/. (Accessed on: 20th July 2022).