Paper short abstract:

We share our experiences about a course at university at whose pedagogical heart was making. While discussing our readings about crafting and crisis, we were embroidering freely on our hoops. Our talk is about different perceptions on how the course setting influenced our learning trajectory.

Paper long abstract:

Last semester, we attended a course entitled DIY in Times of Crisis and Beyond at the University of Graz at whose pedagogical heart was making. While discussing our readings about crafting and crisis, we were embroidering freely on our hoops – far away from academic teaching conventions we were used to. It was not just about our intellectual thinking, but about an embodied learning experience.

For the purpose of this paper, we want to think about how many perspectives anthropologists can take. In the course we discovered four different levels: Me as a researcher, me as a crafter, me as a student and me as an object of research. Bearing with the silence during our conversations and the resistance of the material challenged us. Each of us used the emotion of resistance as an opportunity for research and reflection. We weren’t just ethnographers but also became the object of enquiry of each other. Sometimes we would lay down our needles and grab our pens to write down field notes about our fellow students. Sometimes we became the ones that were written about.

In our talk we will speak about our diverse realities on how the mentioned course setting and pedagogy influenced our learning trajectory and will dwell on our at times diverging corpo/realities in relation to stitching-while-thinking due to our different stages in academic training. We talk about our experiences as beginners and more advanced students and the entanglement between bodily ethnography, emotions and academic knowledge.