Skip to main content

Make + Risk = Craftivism: A Roundtable and Yarnbomb Project for Babel 2017

For the 2017 Babel Working Group Meeting in Reno, I'm organizing a project for The Material Collective.  The full proposal appears below.  Get in touch if you are interested in participating!


Make + Risk = Craftivism: A Roundtable and Yarnbomb Project

A dominant symbol of the January 2017 Women’s March on Washington was the pink pussyhat: a knit or crochet hat constructed in such a way that cat ears appear on the wearer’s head.  Large numbers of women participated in making pussyhats and wore them at marches in Washington and other cities.  Yet the hats were also a focus for critique, as the product of a white middle-class feminism that often fails to take into account the experiences of other women, and as excluding transwomen in particular through their reference to biological sex.  In many ways, this combination of responses to the pussyhats mirrors the responses to the March itself.  It also demonstrates both the productive potential and the potential pitfalls of “craftivism:” that is, of activism pursued through forms of craft production that have traditionally been done by women.



Through this proposed roundtable session and hands-on project for Babel 2017, The Material Collective seeks to engage with the issues raised by the pussyhats in two ways.  First, through a roundtable session featuring multiple short presentations and time for discussion, we aim to set the hats within a larger historical context of craftivism, to further explore the potential of this form of activist production, and simultaneously to further its critique.  Secondly, we aim to explore these issues through practice in a “yarmbomb” project: yarnbombing refers to knit and/or crochet projects that are installed in public space on the model of street art or graffiti.  While not all yarnbomb projects are also craftivist projects, some are, and yarnbombing itself is open to critique on a number of levels.  We envision a yarnbomb project conceived with the themes of the Babel 2017 conference in mind, produced largely at the conference itself, facilitated through a knit and/or crochet workshop or workshops as part of the conference, and installed throughout the conference space.  We invite participants to present in the roundtable, to collaborate with us in conceptualizing the yarnbomb project, to make work for that project in advance of the conference, to lead a workshop or workshops in knit/crochet techniques at the conference, and to contribute materials (yarn from stashes, hooks and/or needles) for the project.  Participants may chose to be involved in one or more or all of the above.



 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Virgin at Chartres, White Supremacy, and Medieval Studies

Medieval Studies blew up online this past weekend when a Rachel Fulton Brown, an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Chicago (my graduate institution, although I did not study with her), published a few pieces on her blog aimed at Dorothy Kim (an Assistant Professor at Vassar College, who I know from the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship) for her insistence that medieval studies as a field needs to grapple with the way its materials have been and are currently being used by white supremacists to support their ideology and that those of us who teach medieval materials need to signal our rejection of white supremacist beliefs to our students. While the first post begins (and the second continues) an attack on Kim, the bulk of it is given over to an argument about the Virgin Mary that is framed around a famous window from Chartres Cathedral, known as Notre Dame de la Belle Verriere (our lady of the beautiful window).  According to Fulton Brown, th
7 comments
Read more

À mon seul désir

This post has been brewing for a while - since my Spring Break trip to Paris.  It springs from one of my visits to the Cluny during that trip, when I ended up in the Unicorn tapestries room. I've been in there before of course, if only because it is the only air-conditioned space in the museum.  My first month-long trip summer trip to Paris I took in July instead of June and it was hot (and a little smelly).  I was spending my afternoons in museums looking at Virgin and Child statues and most of the Cluny's are gathered in a gallery right next to the tapestries room, so I would duck in there to sit in the a.c. for a bit whenever I got just too uncomfortable.  On this most recent trip, in March, it was freezing cold and I got routed through the room because that space with the Virgins was briefly closed for some reason. And for some other reason I was struck by the panel above, sometimes labelled as the Lady and the Unicorn.  Struck not so much by its imagery, as by its
12 comments
Read more

Paris, patterns, textures, textiles: A photo-essay

I head home from Paris tomorrow.  I've done a lot of work here: finished drafting an article and wrote my talk for Kalamazoo.  But I've also taken a lot of photographs of the city and done a lot of knitting, producing two now of these yarn-bombs for lamp posts (I'll install the second tomorrow morning before heading to the airport.  It was intended to replace the first, but since it's actually still there, the second will have to go on a different lamp post).  This blog post is meant to tie those last two pursuits together, very visually.  It's also, then, a meditation on one of the things I love about this city; the textures, the patterns, and the details in the architecture, the street furniture, and the street itself. Yarn-bomb in the Place Louis Aragon on the Ile St. Louis.   Crosswalk on the Rue St. Antoine. Yarn-bomb detail.   Detail of wrought-iron work on a tomb in Pere Lachaise.   Yarn-bomb detail.
27 comments
Read more