Carrying the Craft | Podcast

This podcast expands on a series of informal making sessions that were organised as part of the Cultural Negotiation of Science research group ten year celebration at Northumbria University in November 2024. These sessions, called ‘Carrying the Craft’ explore craft-based making as both research and non-hierarchical, pedagogical method.

We are not expert craftspeople but have adopted making rituals to help understand a lived knowledge production, accessible only in the doing; through the Craft. By coming together with other perspectives, disciplines and expertise in the ‘carrier bag’ (Le Guin 1986) of our loosely termed but inherently repetitious and ritualistic practices, we create the space for enriched new understandings to emerge from the mesh.

Craft is a networked knowledge, distributed through systems that mimic the fabrics it weaves; for Gentle Gestures we have made a podcast that both acts as a ‘container’ for documentation and a reflection on Carrying the Craft workshops. This podcast embeds and expands our research contexts and un/enfolds the making with each craft’s histories, ecologies, technologies and worldings; a spoken word ‘carrier bag’.