Turning higher education hierarchies inside out: Sticky encounters in co-designing a community centre using multimodal interventions

The rural-urban migration of young people leaves the elderly in a vulnerable position that threatens the social sustainability of rural communities. This chapter presents a multimodal design approach for a community engagement intervention in a village community in the North West Province of South Africa. University art and design students and members of the community collaborate to develop and design a community centre to support the transfer of indigenous knowledge and practices to the next generation. It addresses the entanglements that inevitably arise in such work in relation to coloniality, race, class, and gender within pre- and post-apartheid structures.