Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 10, Issue 1-2, 2020

This article examines the relationship between traditional and creative research methods through the case study of The Social Studio (TSS), an art-based social enterprise in Melbourne, Australia. TSS aims to address systemic barriers to employment and education for people from refugee and migrant backgrounds through training and work experience in fashion and textiles. Specifically, the article reflects on the embodied, co-making learning space and model of TSS which addresses some of the barriers faced by migrant and refugee students in accessing formal education. Our research brings together traditional research methods, such as interviews and observation, as well as a creative workshop where both research subjects and researchers were taught a weaving activity. The article reflects critically on the limitations of traditional research methods, the challenges of researching in creative community contexts and also the need to document and analyse how material and embodied experiences impact on social and community development.

Fast fashion has become notorious for its environmental, social and psychological implications. This article reports on some of the work undertaken as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded ‘S4S: Designing a sensibility for sustainable clothing’ project, which sought to combine social science and participatory arts-based research methods to explore how processes of ‘making together’ in community textiles groups might generate a new ethic, or sensibility, among consumers to equip them to make more sustainable clothing choices. The study develops a novel methodology that responds to the complex demands of participatory working. It required careful management of the combinations of methods, which included various different making workshops; wardrobe audits; interviews; films and journal keeping. The project also raises the question of using multi-modal formats, which generate rich data, but also add to the complexity, highlighting a need for multi-disciplinary teams. The article focuses on participant responses from two series of five-day workshops that explored: (1) hand-making fabrics by spinning, dyeing and weaving thread; and (2) deconstructing and reconstructing knitted garments. The embodied encounters offered in the workshops encouraged participants to reflect on the fluidity of garments, by which we mean coming to view clothing not as fixed objects but rather as open and full of potentiality for change. For example, a jumper might be unravelled and the wool used for a different piece of clothing, or a dress unpicked and the fabric used for some entirely different garment. The resultant affective responses ranged from a deeper engagement with the materialities of the clothing industry to an awareness of the amount of time incorporated in the process of making clothes as participants started to re-imagine clothing through the embodied act of re-making.

This article reflects on the use of, and interactions between, embroidery and reed weaving as methods in anthropological fieldwork with Malagasy craftswomen. The research explores changes in craft methodologies as weavers faced with declining natural resources have shifted to practising embroidery instead. Engagement with the making process was central to the research design, through an apprenticeship in reed weaving and participant observation using both crafts. Reflection on this approach suggests that the researcher’s pre-existing skills affected the role that each craft took in the research, shaping distinct modes of interaction and generating different types of knowledge. Research activities using weaving, in which the researcher was seen as ‘unskilled’, tended to generate technical, practical and logistical knowledge. Activities using embroidery, in which the researcher was already experienced and seen as a ‘skilled’ practitioner, shaped more exploratory research spaces in which more personal conversations emerged. This article discusses ways that the two processes were used to complement each other and suggests that combining both ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ positions could help to overcome some of the challenges of cross-cultural craft research.

This article discusses the informal learning processes of a quilting community, located in Aotearoa New Zealand, as participants engage in a collaborative textile project. Few studies have investigated everyday quilters’ collective learning processes, even though communal quiltmaking has been undertaken over the centuries. The concept of zone of proximal development (zpd) is extended as a ‘collective zone of proximal development’ where people are doing something together. This ethnographic study views quiltmaking as a sociocultural activity, and emphasizes the situated nature of knowing within a community-based setting. Research methods reveal the explicit and tacit dimensions of the quilters’ meaning making. During the fieldwork, flexibility and reflexivity are required to overcome ethical issues as they arise. The guided participation is revealed through the quilters’ interactions as they participated in their collaborative activity. Learning sequences present episodic details of the way these interactions are constructed and developed. The quilters actively seek to increase opportunities for learning and for sharing skills and knowledge through participation partnerships involving multi-way collaborations.

This reflective case study sets out to ask ‘How do participatory textile-making projects engage and impact participants and recipients?’ by focusing on Knitted Knockers UK, a global network of knitters who voluntarily create prosthetics for women following mastectomy or lumpectomy. The article examines the choices women are faced with following breast cancer surgery, and considers ‘softer options’ to surgical reconstruction, including knitted prosthetics. Drawing on qualitative data gathered via personal communications and social media, personal experience of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, and feminist discourse with relation to breast cancer and the body, the authors evaluate the relationship between well-being, healthcare and digitally connected knitting communities. They offer reflections on the materiality of care the Knitted Knockers represent and consider the role these hand-knitted prosthetics can play in providing a sense of community and emotional well-being for both the creators and the recipients of these knitted gifts.

This work draws on two sister projects which explored the subjective perceptions of wellbeing in women amateur makers who hand crafted in knit and crochet when alone rather than in physical group settings. In the first, participants engaged in a Ph.D. research project where they contributed experiences of sharing their making in a closed group on Facebook, ‘stitching together’ in digital space. In the second, a small, self-selected number from the Facebook research group also took part in a journal-writing project; here, they recorded their experiences of knit, crochet and its impact on wellbeing over several months and shared journals directly back to the researcher rather than the wider Facebook group. Participants from these complementary projects provided insight into the ways that working with yarn helped them feel connected, calm and creative whilst also revealing that their experiences in knit and crochet were not always the soothing panacea one might expect. The approaches in these two projects illustrate how a rich understanding of the ways hand crafting together may be beneficial for wellbeing can be developed even where participants and the researcher are physically remote from one another. Several distinctive methodological contributions can be claimed in these related works: First, the approaches taken in both the journal writing and Facebook-based projects opened up space to question and explore the ethics of care for researcher wellbeing in having participant stories to ‘hold’; secondly, the reflective distance provided by online commentaries and the writing of a journal over time allowed more complex craft experience stories to emerge than would normally be facilitated through a shorter workshop setting.

The Weaving Kiosk project was a series of nine temporary weaving spaces that took place in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Iceland throughout 2017 and 2018. Each Kiosk provided catalysts for conversations beyond preconceived ideas of what hand weaving in northern Europe means today. Using the two-year participatory Weaving Kiosk project as a case study, this article seeks to complement Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘visiting’ as a research inquiry method with the idea of ‘having visits’ as a method for approaching participation. The methods of visiting and having visits share their central ambition, but differ in their motion vectors and material densities. While visiting describes an outward discovery into unknown physical and intellectual territory, having visits resonates as an inward discovery into an authored material territory through dialogue with the visitor, space and host. This article considers how the dialogical research tools used in the Weaving Kiosk become testable through having visits.

Anthropological research is qualitative, emergent, even intuitive. As Ingold proposes, in this regard, it has much in common with arts practice. Anthropologists often follow ‘foreshadowed problems’, joining in with the mundane, interconnected tasks of people’s daily lives in the communities where they are based. Textiles, like other crafts, fit well here, often bringing in ‘women’s work’, domesticity, stories of everyday life and extending across the traditional, the popular, the modern. What this brings (we hope) is texture, quality, a rich description and the voices of our field companions. Collaboration brings an extending and questioning of the boundaries. Where does standard participant observation end and collaboration and making textiles begin? When does practical engagement constitute an intervention? And does intervening, and thus changing local practices in the field, matter? How can collaboration affect the field-site, the textiles and their limits? Who writes the results, whose voices are heard? In my case, early fieldwork ranged from making felt textiles to mundane domestic tasks such as cooking and washing up. But as collaboration, it expanded into sending letters, making work together, cultural exchanges, even symposia. In this article, I draw on case studies from research in Kyrgyzstan and Scotland to explore how collaborations through textile work may (with rigour) enhance inter-community knowledge and communication and produce growth and cumulative understanding.