Quilting as a Qualitative, Feminist Research Method: Expanding Understandings of Migrant Deaths

ABSTRACT

Centering the author’s experience of representing migrant deaths through non-discursive composing practices, this article forwards quilting as a feminist, qualitative research method. The author promotes quilting as method, grounded in arts based research and feminist rhetorical practices, a method that functions as a three-part scaffold in practice: employing critical imagination through tacking in and tacking out, crafting a narrative, and gaining a better understanding of the phenomenon at hand. This tactile method has the potential to expand conceptions of research, embrace the messiness of research, and deepen understandings of phenomena shallowly understood by other methods.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Dustin Edwards and Dylan Dryer for their essential feedback on this article as well as the two RR reviewers, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins and Bo Wang, for their kind and critical comments that significantly helped me develop this article.

2. See De León.

3. See Roberts’s notion of Heirloom Value.

4. See De León; Lydgate.

5. See American Immigration Council; United States Border Patrol.

6. Places where migrants stop to rest and leave behind items they no longer need.

7. Madelyn Pawlowski Tucker contributed a cross stitched barrel cactus and Benjamin Pawlowski contributed a hand-drawn maze of a saguaro cactus.

8. The MQP does not include inner batting because quilts are easier to display and aren’t used as covers.

9. From my experience volunteering with Casa Alitas in Tucson, Arizona, a transition house for undocumented migrants recently released from detention.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sonia C. Arellano

Sonia C. Arellano is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. Her research focuses on textile projects that address social justice issues, particularly at the intersections of migration and death. Her current book project examines the tactile rhetoric of the Migrant Quilt Project, which uses quilts to memorialize migrant lives lost while crossing into the US. Her work can be found in Peitho: The Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, and College Composition and Communication. Email: [email protected]