Seher Mirza

Dr Seher Mirza is a cross-cultural design practitioner, facilitator, and a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK. She is also an associate lecturer at London College of Fashion. She is associate editor at the Journal of Design, Business and Society, UK and a member of the Art Workers Guild in London as well as on its outreach committee.

Seher is a textile maker specializing in hand weave, with over 15 years of experience working with marginalized communities, especially artisanal, in grassroots craft development contexts and diasporic communities in the UK. She has a PhD in textiles and social innovation from the Royal College of Art (2020). She has extensive experience working on multiple projects across sectors including industry and development agencies with marginalized and vulnerable communities through the premise of textiles, fashion, craft and making, analyzing power dynamics and power relations frameworks for equitable futures. Seher developed a critical self-reflective framework for power relations for designers working collaboratively, ‘Power Signifiers’, building on social science participatory frameworks. Her work contributes to the wider social design discourse on oppression, decoloniality and indigenous knowledge, while promoting craft practices as method and in knowledge generation in participatory design research. She works with textiles as modes of inquiry, as substrates, as forms of expression while investigating the role of practice in design research.

Her research contributes to broader discussion on proposing, experimenting, and reflecting on methodologies that bridge Global North and Global South perspectives, foregrounding inclusive, participatory, and just knowledge exchanges that challenge dominant culture and discourse. Currently working on participatory projects in UK, Pakistan, Brazil and Colombia. She publishes regularly on material culture, textiles (particularly in Sindh), craft, participatory design, equitable futures including her forthcoming conference paper ‘Crafting Savage Futures: translanguaging and the material politics of peripheral making’ at the Design Research Society Conference 2026, Edinburgh and book chapter, ‘Textiles: the material cultural definers of Sindh’s legacy’ in (Eds) Boivin and Cook, Handbook of Sindhi Studies. Routledge.