Knitting the in_visible: data-driven craftivism as feminist resistance

ABSTRACT

Feminist scholars are drawing attention to how conventional forms of data representation fail to make visible the experiences of women and marginalized communities. While the problem of reinscribing the in_visibility of already under-visualized communities (and crises) is being acknowledged from a data science perspective, little attention is being paid to how craft redresses these issues of visibility. ‘Craftivism’, or the move towards activist craft, resists both the in_visibility of the form and of the labour that produces it. This essay examines two specific craftivism projects driven by data: Stitching the Curve, a year-long stitched pandemic data project, and the Tempestry Project, which represents climate change data through knitting. Drawing on Andre Brock’s critical technocultural discourse analysis as a methodology to understand how these craftivist data visualizations circulate on social media, we argue that in their form and their content, craftivist data visualizations redress what Perez terms the ‘gender data gap’ through embracing a feminist ethos. These projects offer an essential space for understanding craft’s potential for resistance, modelling the inherent subversion of employing the ‘feminine’ textile as a site for feminist visualization and meaning-making, while also subject to the same challenges as craft itself – dismissal, marginalization and in_visibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Craftivism
• data
• visualization
• knitting
• feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abigail Moreshead

Abigail Moreshead has a PhD in Texts & Technology from the University of Central Florida and is currently a visiting lecturer of English at UCF. Her research exists at the intersection of book studies and feminist media studies with a focus on gendered labor in textual production and knowledge creation. Her work has been published in Nineteenth Century Gender Studies and Feminist Media Studies.

Anastasia Salter

Anastasia Salter is a professor of English at the University of Central Florida, and author most recently of Playful Pedagogy in the Pandemic: Pivoting to Games-Based Learning (with Emily Johnson, Routledge 2022) and Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives (with Stuart Moulthrop, Amherst College 2021). They serve as Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization.