International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Amiri-Savitzky, T., Swinnen, A., & Visse, M. (2024). Care as entangled meaningfulness in craft occupations: A co-created photo-elicitation. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 25(si1.5). http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea25si1.5

Crafts have traditionally been central to the fields of human occupation, mostly investigated in the context of rehabilitation and disability, via humanistic perspectives and representational methods. However, recent interest in subjective lived experiences, along with a growing appreciation of posthuman perspectives on craft, occupation, and care, invite us to learn new approaches to the study of human-non-human entanglements and relational care aspects in meaningful craft occupations. Employing sensory ethnography, which embraces reflexivity, embodiment, and emplacement to explore lived experiences, and an apophatic stance of wonder, this article explores the craft occupations of three women in midlife. Introducing a posthuman adaptation of photo-elicitation that invites participants, researchers, and non-human actors to iteratively co-create meanings, the resulting vignettes reveal that meaningfulness in craft occupations is experienced and expressed through various forms of relational care entanglements: to and from one’s own self; to and from others in the social world; and to and from the material world. Whether experiencing pride at learning to solder silver, connection in gifting paper crafts to a friend, or wonder at the sensorial qualities of hay, these human-non-human intra-actions during craft touch on the unsayable aspects of meaningful occupation. Capturing ephemeral moments of entanglement, the vignettes “live the questions” and illuminate verbalized and tacit aspects of relational care during meaningful occupations. Embracing this multiplicity of meanings, it becomes clear that it is through the occupation of craft that humans and materials come together to care for one another, and thus for the shared world itself.