Well-making: co-building pathways for empathy

This one day interactive workshop at the Wellcome Collection in London 2017 explored new research on inclusive design and empathy with a particular focus on how maker spaces might be better understood as ‘well-making spaces’: spaces of empathy that promote health and wellbeing. The event included a keynote by Professor Lizbeth Goodman, Chair of Creative Technology Innovation at University College Dublin, founder/director of the SMARTlab and MAGIC (Multimedia and Games Innovation Centre) about her international research and current European Horizon 2020 project. Other participants included, among others: Simon Duncan (Boing Boing: Resilience Research and Practice), Dr Anni Raw (School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Durham), Mah Rana (Artist and research student University College London), Jayne Howard (Director Arts Well) and Karl Royale (Head of Enterprise and Commercial Development University of Wolverhampton), Ben Salter (Course Leader Interior Design Norwich University of the Arts), a diverse interdisciplinary group of designers and design researchers, arts and crafts practitioners, social scientists, arts for health organisations, community partners, and health researchersArts & Humanities Research Counci

The power of quiet: Re-making affective amateur and professional textiles agencies

This article is part of a special issue on textiles and intersecting identities. The article was developed from a paper given at the Association of Fashion & Textiles Courses (FTC) Conference, Futurescan 3: Intersecting Identities (Glasgow School of Art, November 2015.This article advocates an enlarged understanding of the benefits of manual creativity for critical thinking and affective making, which blurs the boundaries, or at least works in the spaces between or beyond amateur and professional craft practices and identities. It presents findings from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project: Co-Producing CARE: Community Asset-based Research & Enterprise (https://cocreatingcare.wordpress.com). CARE worked with community groups (composed of amateur and professional textile makers) in a variety of amateur contexts: the kitchen table, the community cafe, the library, for instance, to explore how critical creative making might serve as a means to co-produce community agency, assets and abilities. The research proposes that through ‘acts of small citizenship’ creative making can be powerfully, if quietly, activist (Orton Johnson 2014; Hackney 2013a). Unlike more familiar crafts activism, such ‘acts’ are not limited to overtly political and public manifestations of social action, but rather concern the micro-politics of the individual, the grass roots community and the social everyday. The culturally marginal, yet accessible nature of amateur crafts becomes a source of strength and potential as we explore its active, dissenting and paradoxically discontented aspects alongside more frequently articulated dimensions of acceptance, consensus and satisfaction. Informed by Richard Sennett’s (2012) work on cooperation, Matt Ratto and Megan Bolar (2014) on DIY citizenship and critical making, Ranciere’s (2004) theory of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, and theories of embodied and enacted knowledge, the authors interpret findings from selected CARE-related case studies to explicate various ways in which ‘making’ can make a difference by: providing a safe space for disagreement, reflection, resolution, collaboration, active listening, questioning and critical thinking, for instance, and offer quiet, tenacious and life-enhancing forms of resistance and revision to hegemonic versions of culture and subjectivity

Woman Appeal. A New Rhetoric of Consumption: Women’s Domestic Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s

When in 1926 two brothers from South Wales, William and Gomer Berry, struck a deal to acquire the entire business of the Amalgamated Press (AP), they took on the mantle of ‘Britain’s leading magazine publishing business,’ after the untimely death of AP owner and press magnate, Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe) (Cox and Mowatt 2014: 60–3). The continued importance of magazines aimed at the female reader for the Berry’s empire was emphasised by William in his first speech as chairman, and in the coming years a host of new titles including Woman and Home, Woman’s Journal, Woman’s Companion, Wife and Home, Woman and Beauty and Home Journal were added to established staples such as Home Chat, Women’s Pictorial, Woman’s World and Woman’s Weekly. The launch of over fifty titles by AP and its rivals Newnes and Pearson, and Odhams Press, put women and their magazines at the forefront of popular publishing in the interwar years. By the end of the 1930s Odhams Press, under the direction of its dynamic managing director Julias Elias (Lord Southwood), had usurped the AP’s position with its innovative publication Woman, which brought the visual appeal of good quality colour printing to a tuppeny weekly, something that previously had only been available in expensive, high-class magazines. The interwar years witnessed expansion and consolidation, struggle and innovation as these publishing giants competed to command the lucrative market for women’s magazines

Beyond Utility: Pushing Frontiers in Women's Monthlies: Modern Woman 1943-1951

‘Beyond Utility’ focuses on Modern Woman, a mid-range women’s monthly magazine, in the years during and immediately after the Second World War. It argues that a new consciousness of the power of female citizenship emerged at this time, which remains significant today. Building on observations about an ‘emergent feminist consciousness’ in the magazine Housewife from 1943 (Forster 2015: 47) and claims that from 1946 the ‘frontiers of modern women’s journalism’ were being pushed back due to increased controversial content (White 1970: 130), the chapter uncovers how this new consciousness unfolds in Modern Woman’s editorial, fashion and domestic features in 1943, 1946 and 1951. It includes new material about the publication’s editorial team and journalistic decision-making and, contextualising the shifting discourses in editorial, advertising and illustration, identifies how the publication offered readers new identities and affordances as active, politicised citizens. The chapter appears in the collection, Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s, in the series The Edinburgh History of Women’s Periodical Culture in Britain, which has been formative in bringing the latest scholarship on women’s print culture to national and international audiences. This collection spans domestic, cultural and feminist magazines, incorporates ephemera, novels and digital magazines and draws attention to the diverse discourses, messages, formats, readerships and appeals that contributed to, challenged, or informed British women’s print culture. Edited by Forster and Hollows, authorities on women’s media and print culture, the collection is interdisciplinary and includes contributions from young scholars and such established figures as Lucy Delap (University of Cambridge) and Janet Floyd (KCL) The collection employs interview, textual analysis and industry commentary and Hackney’s chapter is significant for its combination of textual and visual analysis, contextualising new readings of primary material within wider social, political, economic discourses in publishing, fashion journalism, and the home

Crafting with a purpose: how the ‘work’ of the workshop makes, promotes and embodies well-being

This article examines two community arts textile projects to consider the relationship between workshops, as method (and methodology), and the research/knowledge that emerges from and through them. The ‘workshop’ is understood as the structural relationship between people, processes, materials and place, while ‘work’ is the knowledge/research that emerges from these interactions. While different in intent and structure, both projects share concerns about making, health and well-being. Craftivist Garden #wellMAKING worked with a network of local amateur craft groups across the United Kingdom to think critically about health and well-being, while Kotha and Kantha examined how stitch serves as an alternative well-making strategy for a group of Bangladeshi-born women living in Manchester, United Kingdom. The article argues that thinking about the workshop as a ‘holding form’ and/or ‘bloom space’ and paying attention to the stories told and artefacts (knowledge objects) made in workshops is vital to understanding their value

Diary of a Well-Maker: a note on crafts as research practice

This paper signals the value of making for well-being as a reflexive research activity. It focuses on a series of short reflective diary entries created by artist and researcher Mah Rana during her daily encounters with people, spaces, places, and things. The entries are personal and incidental, involve memories and snippets of conversation but, crucially, they are all positioned from her perspective as a self-identified ‘well-maker’. Someone, that is, who is alert to the particular values, benefits, qualities, and characteristics of creative making for mental and physical health: who takes note of how these manifest in our everyday lives, often in the quietest of ways

Designing a sensibility for sustainable clothing

Our submission to the committee is drawn from research that we are conducting as part of our AHRC-funded grant entitled ‘Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing’ (S4S). In this project, we conduct a series of workshops in Cornwall and Wolverhampton, engaging participants in making fabric, and making mending and modifying clothes. We use multiple social scientific methodologies to understand the effect these workshops have on participants’ attitudes and behaviour in relation to clothing and fast fashion.Arts & Humanities Research Counci

Stitching a Sensibility 4 Sustainable Clothing: quiet activism, affect and community agency

Abstract 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 5-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