Paper short abstract

This paper explores recovery as a process of learning, and the role of craft-making in it; the type and nature of "knowledge from recovery"; and the importance of "knowing from the inside" for the Art, Health, and Wellbeing scholarship and research

Paper long abstract

This paper is based upon my experience of losing one leg in 2016. I suddenly had to deal with a permanent disability and a new identity. My body, my world, and I were radically and forever changed, thus becoming completely unfamiliar to me. I had no references to either navigate this new life or understand this new body. Recovery is for me an ongoing process of learning to make new references on the go; draw new maps to navigate a new world; become acquainted with a new body and a new self.

Here I tell my own story from my triple interrelated "identity" as someone who is undergoing a major life-changing experience of illness and disability; as an amateur craft-maker, and as an academic, i.e. someone who is "in the business of knowledge" and whom in the recent years before illness struck, was researching the relation between craft and well-being widely defined. The interrelationship of these three identities means that in my account, disability and illness are not so much topics of academic discussion about the role that craft-making can play in the recovery process, but rather they are the existential condition from where I tell my story. A story that is less about my specific disability and recovery process, and more a story told through a "wounded body.