Craft Activism, Memory-Making, and Political Action
About Craft Activism, Memory-Making, and Political Action
Writer, editor, professor and craft convenor Hinda Mandell will provide a framework to approach handcraft as a tool for political expression and organizing. She will discuss how craft has been used across time and culture by (mostly) women as a handmade mechanism to express their voice when they were denied a political one, and to chronicle family legacies, when they were under attack. Mandell will share craft case studies from her book, Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats (Rowman & Littlefield 2019) as examples of how handcraft both responds to, and shapes, political events and social norms. And will conclude with of-the-moment examples of craft-based activism in the American political arena.
Hinda Mandell
Hinda Mandell, Ph.D., is professor in the School of Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, where she is the director of the university’s journalism program. Mandell is editor of Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019); co-curator and co-editor of Crafting Democracy: Fiber Arts and Activism (RIT Press, 2019); a co-editor of Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election (University of Rochester Press, 2018); the author of Sex Scandals, Gender and Power in Contemporary American Politics (Praeger, 2017); and co-editor of Scandal in a Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). As a journalist, her work has been published in Politico, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The LA Times, among other publications. Her scholarly inquiries into collaborative handcraft as change-agents have been published in Craft Research, the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, and forthcoming in the Journal of Feminist Scholarship. She is on the international advisory board of the Journal of Craft & Communities, and her research has been funded by the Center for Craft and Fiber Art Now. In 2020 she was a guest artist with Visual Studies Workshop, whose residency funded the production of her artist book, The Yarn Must Live: A Polemic on a Pandemic and Public Art, which was acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2021. Since 2017, she has organized maker interventions on issues of social reform tied to geographic place, reaching 2,000 craft participants. She is on Instagram @crochetactivism.
When
Single 90-min session on Tuesday, November 28, at 7 pm ET | 4 pm PT | 23:00 UTC.
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MAFA - The MidAtlantic Fiber Association
The MidAtlantic Fiber Association (MAFA) represents and supports a community of fiber arts guilds in the greater Mid-Atlantic region.
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