How do you think your Pakistani heritage and your British education work together in your design process?British education gave me a very strong sense of design as well as prepar-ng me for field work and negotiation, which especially helped me to navigate the very complex work with social communities. But beyond that, it was a process of relearning when I got back to my country, I found a completely different reality in Pakistan. We never discussed poverty,disadvantaged societies, or disparities. These were not topics that came up in interaction with the faculty or other students. When growing up and as a student I was removed from the reality of my country. When I left Pakistan to study in England, I was very young. With my father having been a high-level bureaucrat during the British rule and Pakistan just getting its independence, the concept of western culture as being superior was what I grew up with. It took me some time to realise thatthis is not the case. Luckily my husband, who had studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, was also an avid photographer. When we came back to Pakistan, we walked around Pakistan's old towns and the more I studied my heritage the more i was fascinated by it. I had to learn a lot about my own country. It was much later that i realised there were a lot of injustices in my country, and I simply had todosomething about it.
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