Craftivism!: The Possibilities and Problems of Craft as a Mode of Feminist Community Building and Social Action
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Craftivism! is a knitting collective that creates baby blankets to be given to mothers through the Healthy Aboriginal Babies Program run by the Katarokwi Native Friendship Centre in Kingston, Ontario. The group of students and community members come together to knit blankets with the aim of addressing and creating awareness about the material differences that Indigenous women experience. Craftivism! is a product of the do‐it‐yourself (DIY) ethic, a form of third‐wave feminism in which crafting is used to honour women’s history and work and to create feminist communities. While knitting has been embraced by third‐wave feminists, knitting is a luxury that many cannot afford. Although the DIY ethic provides women with a sense of self‐reliance and personal satisfaction, it is also self‐indulgent. Thus, Craftivism! aims to celebrate the domestic arts in a mindful way by acknowledging and acting on the material differences that Indigenous women experience. To account for material inequalities without victimizing Indigenous women further, blankets are produced in partnership with women participating in the prenatal program. While Craftivism! promotes purposeful knitting in the spirit of the feminist goals of empowerment, social justice and community building, the project also serves as space to think about the effectiveness of reclaiming craft. Using data from the Craftivism! project, this paper will consider whether or not the valuing of craft is a feminist act, if knitting reinforces stereotypes of femininity, if knitting is an apolitical form of consumerism, and when it is possible for certain groups to engage in knitting as a political activity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".