Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Högskolan för design och konsthantverk (2012-2019)https://hdl.handle.net/2077/306292024-03-28T09:35:24Z2024-03-28T09:35:24ZWorld Wide Workshop: The Craft of NoticingCheng, Nicolashttps://hdl.handle.net/2077/617082019-10-16T01:35:36Z2019-10-15T00:00:00ZWorld Wide Workshop: The Craft of Noticing
Cheng, Nicolas
In my research, I consider craft as a discipline that is extremely elastic in terms of propositions and positions. Today craft exists in a highly dynamic space — what I will refer to as the World Wide Workshop — and is essential for noticing, caring, mending and negotiating the complex relationships that individuals and communities have with their sociopolitical, economic and natural environment. By moving away from the self-reliance implied by traditional studio-based craft practice, I use situated making and situated learning together with and in response to others, as methods that enable me to pay attention and respond to my surroundings, and to observe connections and entanglements offered by craft — what I will refer to as a craft of noticing. This thesis considers craft’s role and potential in a world that is interconnected, globalised, and disrupted by human-caused phenomena.
The research focuses, firstly, on understanding how craft can be both a connector and a method for noticing, and for problematising complex global production and economic issues in today’s postindustrial society. I approach craft as both a physical but also a virtual entity and explore where and how craft-based disciplines are learned, passed on, practised, and shared. Secondly, I look for ways craft can play a strategic role in revealing hidden histories and behaviours. In the process, I have observed how the awareness of entanglement in a complex world system, where it is no longer possible to think in terms of opposites or dichotomies, challenges an anthropocentric worldview and decentralises the human in our relationships to nature and to material resources.
Through my own methodological propositions and personal reflections on making within the realms of contemporary craft and jewellery, the thesis aims to build from the craft of noticing (Tsing 2015) to propose actions of response-ability (Haraway 2016) in the service of a praxis of care and resurgence in a time of environmental crisis. My practice questions our roles and response-abilities as makers in an entangled, damaged world and attempts to move away from a linear extract-produce-discard model to a more circular approach (Tsing 2005, 2015; Haraway 2016), thus testing the possibilities offered by a harvest-care-remediate model.
2019-10-15T00:00:00ZVems hand är det som gör? En systertext om konst/hantverk, klass, feminism och om viljan att ta stridHållander, Fridahttps://hdl.handle.net/2077/584862019-12-12T02:35:35Z2019-01-25T00:00:00ZVems hand är det som gör? En systertext om konst/hantverk, klass, feminism och om viljan att ta strid
Hållander, Frida
Whose hand is making? And how can we understand craft practices in dialogue with society through making and objects? How do we understand objects that manifest resistance? This dissertation in artistic research explores craft practices within the fields of ceramics and textile, through the method and form of autoethnography, and on the basis of an intersectional perspective. It understands making as embodied experience and knowledge, conditioned, but not always bounded, by societal structures, and it documents the resistance against, and the resilience of, repressive structures, in dialogues and struggles where objects gain agency.
It is an examination that moves between the bookishness of libraries and historical trajectories on the one hand and making as collective practice on the other, the latter represented in what this study defines as case studies of making. The study creates the term “together-making” to describe and analyse collective craft practice as simultaneously a method of research and of making as a potentially political and socially-conscious act.
Through two case studies of making the study assembles an archive of willfulness. In the first case study of making, ceramic practice and historical objects emanating from feminist and anti-slavery movements, are explored through a process of together-making, putting together the exhibition From Pottery to Politics in 2016. In the actual exhibition, further ceramic objects from Swedish twentieth century come into play to re-direct the shape of the exhibition, exemplifying the ways in which this study understands objects as manifest, material politics inciting response.
The second case study of making, takes off from the geographical area known as »de sju häraderna«: a centre for Swedish textile manufacture and home-based industry since the seventeenth century. Focusing on a group of local seamstresses who organized Sweden’s first women’s football series in the 1960s – Öxabäck IF – the study investigates textile objects in dialogue with society reflected through the textile history of labour and feminist political movements in the nineteenth and twentieth century. This case study also documents the process of research through together-making, and the exhibition Öxabäck IF – Without You no Tomorrow, 2016.
Avhandling för konstnärlig doktorsexamen i ämnet Konsthantverk vid HDK – Högskolan för design och konsthantverk, Konstnärliga fakulteten, Göteborgs universitet i samverkan med Konstfack, Stockholm.
2019-01-25T00:00:00ZExploring pitfalls of participation and ways towards just practices through a participatory design process in Kisumu, KenyaKraff, Helenahttps://hdl.handle.net/2077/560782019-10-10T01:35:21Z2018-04-12T00:00:00ZExploring pitfalls of participation and ways towards just practices through a participatory design process in Kisumu, Kenya
Kraff, Helena
It is my belief that participatory processes can lead to positive transformations for the people involved. However, I do at the same time recognize that participation is inherently ambiguous and complex, and that this makes it vulnerable to unjust practices. It is this view of participation that led me to a focus on challenges that can emerge in participatory processes, or as they will be referred to in this thesis: pitfalls.
The purpose is to explore pitfalls of participation, especially regarding when, how and why participatory practices lead to unjust forms of participation. My experience of being engaged as a Swedish researcher in a participatory design project in a Kenyan context, and critical reflections on this experience serve as the foundation for this exploration. The project concerns small-scale ecotourism development in a fishing village on the shores of Lake Victoria in Western Kenya, where I worked with the development of ecotourism-related products and services in a participatory manner with a local guide group and residents, and with PhD student colleagues from Sweden and Kenya.
A number of pitfalls are highlighted as particularly problematic, which are connected to either abstracted and simplistic conceptualizations of participants and their participation, or to an unjust role distribution in projects. The terms community, empowerment and ownership are used to exemplify how the use of vague and elusive words to describe participation tends to hide participant diversity or lead to overstatements regarding the benefits derived from the project. I discuss how an unjust access to knowledge resources between actors who are to collaborate closely together hinder co-production of knowledge, and I acknowledge how designers’ and design researchers’ prejudices and a cultural unawareness can lead to some groups not being recognized as important.
The aim is to contribute with methodological guidance regarding how researchers and practitioners can identify and work against the pitfalls that they come across in their practice, and towards achieving just participation.
2018-04-12T00:00:00ZTreåringar, kameror och förskola – en serie diffraktiva rörelserMagnusson, Lena Ohttps://hdl.handle.net/2077/533802017-09-13T01:35:03Z2017-09-12T00:00:00ZTreåringar, kameror och förskola – en serie diffraktiva rörelser
Magnusson, Lena O
The aim of this thesis is to examine what happens when three-year-olds are given access to digital cameras, and what shape and form children’s photographic capacity takes within the framework of everyday pre-school activities. The notion that young children in pre-school rarely get to use cameras themselves, and that they take part in photographs produced by pre-school educators as part of an ongoing documenting practice rooted in the curriculum is the point of departure.
The study has been conducted through an ethnographic approach further strengthened by post-qualitative thinking, where the research material was produced together with children in two different pre-schools. This material includes the children’s intra-actions with the cameras as well as the photographs that emerge during the course of the study.
The thesis moves within a posthumanist theoretical framework, with a special focus on new materialism and agential realism, where humans and non-humans are seen as mutual performative agents. The theoretical perspective permeates the entire study, and does not, therefore, only serve as a support for analyses.
Through diffractive readings, the results show that children and cameras approach pre-school and its visual events in a manner that is not recognisable in previous experiences of how pre-school and the life of children have formerly been made visible. In this study, the children use the cameras to create resistances and to look back at the educators, as well as to show what relations come into being with materials, peers, places, spaces and knowledge formation. The children, together with the cameras, also make visible the power of the eye to direct and display, where the cameras also come to be an aesthetic tool with the capacity to both see and make visible in everyday life. This, in turn, also brings to light aspects of ethics and leads to the breaking up of more traditional and normative photographic actions and expressions.
2017-09-12T00:00:00Z