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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes an interdisciplinary campus craftivist project reclaiming discarded agricultural matter and putting it to productive craft, materials science, narrative, and community-building use.

Paper long abstract:

Cal Poly Pomona (USA) began as the agricultural campus of the California State University’s polytechnic university. Situated among what was then citrus groves and horse ranches, the Pomona campus retains a strong agricultural program, including departments of agribusiness and food industry management, and apparel merchandising and management. Sheep are among the animals in the agricultural program raised for food, and their wool is a campus waste product. This paper analyzes a collaboration among faculty and students in agriculture, engineering, mathematics, anthropology, folklore, and more on this campus, as well as local community partners, to reclaim this wool—washing, carding, dying, spinning, and knitting and crocheting it—while studying the properties, histories, social structures, and stories of wool and its human uses. This craftivist project (Greer 2003, Corbett 2017) asks participants to see agricultural waste differently, to engage with local community craft histories and practices, to work by hand to better understand the properties of the material, to take a slow approach to creating textiles that can be quickly machine-made while sharing folktales and personal stories of craft textile production. In this work, collaborators seek to shift participants’ relationship to waste products, to share local and indigenous knowledge, to build a shared sense of purpose and understanding across disparate academic disciplines, and to demonstrate the possibilities created through shared conversation over skill development and productive practice.