Dr Tanveer Ahmed

Biography

I am a practice-led fashion design researcher and anti-racist educator exploring ways to expose and re-think how dominant Eurocentric racial hierarchies are used as part of the fashion design process. I am a Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Race at Central Saint Martins working across the fashion programme to support decolonial fashion perspectives.

My research emerges from experiences of teaching fashion design over the last twenty years and recognising the urgent need to explore alternative non-extractive, anti-racist and social justice-oriented forms of fashion design pedagogies. This approach emphasizes a more situated, relational and contextualized fashion design praxis by centring plural, non-heteropatriarchal, noncapitalist forms of fashion inspired by pre-colonial concepts of fashion that respect our planet and multi species.

My AHRC funded PhD titled 'Pluriversal Fashions: Towards an Anti-Racist Fashion Design Pedagogy' investigated how white normativity works to exclude non Eurocentric fashion design epistemologies in fashion design pedagogies and used new decolonial feminist pedagogical frameworks to counter dominant dualist definitions of fashion design.

I am currently working on a monograph 'Fashion and Anti-Racism' (Bloomsbury forthcoming).