Design and Political Dissent: Spaces, Visuals, Materialities: Jilly Traganou (ed.), Routledge, 2020. 324 pp., 54 b&w and 16 col. illus., cloth, $160.00. ISBN: 9780815374220.

Design and Political Dissent is a far-reaching and ambitious book not only in its intellectual and geographical scope, but also in its diversity of topics and formats. Presented as traditional case studies, interviews with activists or a mixture of the two the book is richly illustrated with seventy colour and black-and-white photographs. The twenty-three authors hail from North and South America, Asia, and Europe and the book also contains examples of interviews with––and the work of––many activists and designers. I mention this because the richness and breadth of the book epitomizes its value as well as its complexities.

Drawing on the increasingly popular work of Colombian-American theorist Arturo Escobar (2017),1Design and Political Dissent contends that design is an expanding and expansionist field that increasingly infiltrates our everyday world, including our political and activist practices. In doing this the book clearly falls within a strand of design thinking drawing...