Crafts, Textile, and Design

Museology, when trained on craft and textile practices, examines how objects made by hand carry social meaning across time — tracing the ways knitting, weaving, and other handicrafts have functioned as vehicles for activism, collective memory, and everyday resistance. Scholars in this area pay particular attention to craftivism, a practice that fuses making with political intent, and to the long-undervalued role of feminist hand labor in shaping both material culture and social movements. Researchers are actively asking how institutions can preserve and represent craft traditions without flattening their living, community-embedded dimensions, and how well-being outcomes tied to making fit within frameworks of sustainability and DIY culture. A central open question is whether mainstream design and museum contexts can genuinely amplify craft's radical potential, or whether institutional framing tends to neutralize it.

Works

66,610

Total citations

106,624

Keywords

CraftivismHandicraftFeminismWell-beingSustainabilityActivism