Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Through the lens of slow activism and contemplation, this research paper will focus on the temporal and ecological experiences of practitioners and main actors in the field of crafts-making in Palestine. It aims at approaching crafts-making as a site for storytelling and heritage ‘re-work’.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims at approaching crafts-making as a site for storytelling and heritage ‘re-work’. It will critically present and discuss personal and collective stories of young artisans in Palestine, where the settler colonial project and the daily resistance of its conditions shape the initiatives of artisans and their spatial and temporal experiences, their values, intergenerational knowledge, performances, relations to land and environment, and power dynamics by which their work is surrounded.

Through the lens of slow activism and contemplation, this research paper will focus on the temporal and ecological experiences of main actors in the field of crafts-making. It will provide an insight into their daily stories of obtaining and treating raw materials, their relation to the land, and the complex agencies enacted in this creative field.

The ethnographic fieldwork will be conducted in multiple locations in Palestine. The researcher will conduct regular visits and go-alongs and will participate in day-to-day activities of craftspeople. Studied initiatives include farming, furniture making, accessories, and pottery.

This paper will provide an analysis of the materialization of slowness in crafts-making with emphasis on the ecological and cultural assemblages of raw materials, the land, and intergenerational knowledge and skills. It will also analyse contemporary narratives mediated through slow cultural practices. While doing so, the paper will unfold inter-relational social and cultural elements of the contemporary heritage movement in Palestine while providing a contextual anthropology of those who remained in the occupied land. It will centralise Indigenous intergenerational theoretical and practical knowledge and narratives.