Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2025-10: Yaw Ofosu-Asare on landscape, decolonisation and everyday design

In The Four Seasons of Ethnography (2014), scholar and writer Sarah Amira de la Garza asserted that a Eurocentric perspective has insinuated itself to the wisdom traditions of local communities everywhere in ways that insist on domination, superiority and ownership. Providing a 'rich tapestry' and culture-specific contexts to emphasize lived experiences, scholar Yaw Ofosu-Asare employs storied-ethnography as a qualitative methodology that finds kindred affinity to postcolonial theory and participatory research towards "centring and valuing the narratives of those traditionally marginalized in scholarly research" (2025, p. 10). Through counter-acts, storied ethnography and creation-centered ontologies, there is an active refusal in the "erasure of lifeworlds" (Gagnon, 2024, p. 100). 

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series presents a lecture titled Land, Story and Design: Cultural Geographies of Care and Decolonisation from Dr Yaw Ofosu-Asare from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University on 17 October 2025, Friday at 5:30PM (Philippines Standard Time / 7:30PM AEST) via Zoom. 

The talk explores the geography of design as lived practice, showing how communities inscribe memory, resilience, and identity into landscapes through storytelling, ritual, and everyday design. Reading from his most recent book African Design Futures (2024), Ofosu-Asare centres the narrative of Efua from Edina, a coastal town in Ghana, to illustrate how coastal life, market spaces, and communal rituals embody forms of environmental care and spatial knowledge. These ideas may find echoes in the Philippines, where Indigenous practices, local markets, and rituals also root people’s relationship to land and sea. Alongside this, Dr Ofosu-Asare draws on Decolonising Design in Africa to pose a provocation: in seeking to decolonise, how do we avoid creating new hierarchies of knowledge? Together, these perspectives invite us to see landscapes not only as sites of ecological management but also as cultural geographies where futures are imagined and lived.

Yaw Ofosu-Asare is a Ghanaian designer, educator, and researcher based in Australia whose work bridges decolonial design, critical pedagogy, and African futures. He is the author of Decolonising Design in Africa: Towards New Theories, Methods, and Practices (Routledge, 2024) and African Design Futures: Decolonising Minds, Education, Spaces, and Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). With a PhD in Education, his research explores the intersections of Indigenous knowledge systems, storytelling, and visual communication as tools for liberation and transformation.

Currently he is a Lecturer in Communication Design at RMIT University, where he  guides students in connecting theory and practice through industry-partnered studios and critical approaches to design pedagogy. Alongside my teaching, Dr Ofosu-Asare designed for grassroots organisations, educational institutions, and global social change movements, blending community-based design with speculative thinking. He also contributes to projects on climate justice, disability inclusion, and cultural sustainability. His work is rooted in a deep commitment to equity, memory, and creative reimagination.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly lecture given by academic scholars, field-based geography practitioners, members of the local community, and spatial justice advocates to share their knowledge- and practice-based research undertakings. Jointly presented by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS), the Heo/Geo Lecture Series which previously underwent several iterative rebranding positions geography as a discipline that not only straddles the realms of natural/physical and social sciences, humanities, political ecologies, regional and area studies, GI technologies and geospatial storytelling, it is also a vibrant and convivial space that welcomes multiplicities and plural voices. The name Heo/Geo is itself an accommodation to the various understandings, meanings and pronunciations of geography in its indigenous and vernacular forms and the Anglicized name that has since been adapted in the local lexicon.

Dr Ofosu-Asare's lecture is also presented by the Human Geography (HUG) and Media, Literary Geographies and Geohumanites (MELANGE) research groups of the UP Department of Geography and is in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations.

To participate in the lecture, please register through this link: https://tinyurl.com/5bvfkrjn

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Works cited:

De la Garza, S A (2014). The Four Seasons of Ethnography: A Creation-Centered Ontology for Ethnography, In The Global Intercultural Communication Reader, 2nd edition (M K Asante, Y Miike and J Yin [eds.]), Routledge, pp. 151-173.

Gagnon, T (2024). Storying Against Dispossession: Nurturing Memories of Other Worlds, In Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty (T V Gagnon [ed.]), The University of Arizona Press, pp. 79-104.

Ofosu-Asare, Y (2025). Reimagining foundations: Storied-ethnography as a pathway to decolonized design education, Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, pp. 1-29.

Ofosu-Asare, Y (2024). African Design Futures: Decolonising Minds, Education, Spaces, and Practices. Springer Nature/Palgrave Macmillan.

Ofosu-Asare, Y (2024). Decolonising Design in Africa: Towards New Theories, Methods, and Practices, Routledge.