Practice-based cultural inquiry
This research cluster explores culture through making as well as analysis. Design, dress, costume, visual identity and speculative practice can function as forms of inquiry into how Caribbean people imagine themselves and the futures they consider possible.
Afrofuturism
Afrofuturism provides a language for connecting Black historical experience with speculative futures, technology and creative self-definition. In a Caribbean context it opens questions about whose future is imagined, whose aesthetics are considered modern and how local histories can participate in global futurist discourse.
Barbadian and Caribbean design
Design is not merely decorative. It encodes material constraints, climate, history, identity and aspiration. Caribbean design research can therefore investigate how local visual languages and making practices are translated, commercialized or transformed in contemporary contexts.
Cosplay as curriculum
Cosplay can be approached as a form of cultural pedagogy: research, interpretation, fabrication, performance and identity-making occur within a single practice. As curriculum, it creates bridges among design, history, storytelling, technology and embodied learning.
Sustainable fashion and material culture
Sustainable fashion raises questions about materials, waste, local production and cultural value. Practice-based research can examine how Caribbean resources and design traditions might contribute to more responsible creative industries.
Future-making
The connecting question is authorship. Who gets to imagine the future, represent the Caribbean within it and build the material or symbolic forms through which that future becomes visible?
This work forms part of the wider AI Masters Barbados scholarship programme. For lectures, seminars, institutional discussions or research collaboration, request a session.
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