Hsin Fang

Crafting-with Radical Democratic Futures: Collective Practices in Craft and Art Education (Panel)

Hsin Fang, with Merium Qureshi, Amber Ward – Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA

Abstract:

This panel introduces our research that explores craft pedagogies through radical democracy (Freire, 2014; Giroux, 1996; hooks, 1994), when collaborating with each other and residential classes featured in summer programs from a folk school in the United States. In addition to tracing the richness of the folk school’s pedagogical emphasis on craft, we (three researchers) creatively and collectively craft-with our natural and political surroundings as unexpected territories. Working from a communal way of knowing-in-making and embodying co-creation and empowerment, we aim to resist social hierarchies within and outside of our collaboration and advance equity and difference. A research methodology we are calling ‘crafting-with’ is used to foreground underrepresented craft materials, histories, and praxis toward a radical democratic togetherness. This methodology views crafting-with not only as a practice of making but also as an embodied way of knowing, where educators, learners, and materials are in dynamic conversation. Inspired by folk school philosophy, we use a series of craft retreats to creatively document archival data on folk school craft, beginning in the 1950s, and intertwine it with our natural surroundings, cultural experiences, political concerns, and pedagogical optimism as a way to reterritorialize and re-envision the place of craft in art education. An additional unexpected territory materializing from this research is one of horizontal mentorship whereby we – a faculty member, doctoral candidate, and undergraduate student – work to mentor each other all while acknowledging the various power differentials that accompany our given identities and while navigating the discomfort of a new collaboration with fluid, unpredictable responsibilities and goals. In sum, this research interweaves data, pedagogy, culture, gender, and political engagement to animate art education toward a more collaborative and democratic future through craft.