Productive Discomfort: Canadian Hooked Rugs and the Pedagogy of Unwelcome Mats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If the function of a welcome mat is to greet guests with niceties, what can an unwelcome mat offer? Common greetings like “welcome” and “home sweet home” can be found on the hooked rug objects placed on opposite sides of a doorway. However, anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist queer crip perspectives remind us that objects and spaces are never truly welcoming to all. Spaces are not neutral and objects are not as benign as they may seem. Hooked rugs are commonly understood as a Canadian folk art medium, a cultural product and a process of making that emerged with the settlement of British colonisers and European immigrants beginning in the 18th century in Maine and Nova Scotia. This dissertation establishes how the material culture of rug hooking pedagogically contributes towards settler colonial logic and narratives. In addition to exploring how rug hooking maintains settler colonial values and myths, I examine how arts-based research methods and specifically research-creation uniquely respond to and interrogate the colonial conventions found in rug hooking cultures. Through the development and facilitation of a rug hooking exhibition featuring seven “unwelcome” rugs, this dissertation considers the potential of textile-based craft in drawing attention to how settler societies operate, and what confrontation and discomfort look like within the feminised and informal space of craft. I posit the practice of socially based craft within a larger conversation of research-creation in the social sciences and humanities, and contribute to the theorization of artistic ways of knowing. The project also includes a zine intended to be circulated amongst rug hooking communities and shares critical reflections about Canadian rug hooking. Through the research process two key findings emerged: providing resources and paying people to learn craft is critical, and additionally the social space of craft is a place for critical learning informed by collaboration and co-making.Acentral argument this dissertation posits is that the culture and social practice of rug hooking can reflect and circulate myths and doctrines related to the settlement of Canada and simultaneously operates as a site of resistance against colonial power and logic.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".