The Routledge Handbook of Making: Craft-based Research Methods and Pedagogy

The Routledge Handbook of Making: Craft-based Research Methods and Pedagogy is a book that celebrates the embodied process of craft methods. It uniquely centralises crafting, the practice of doing and making, as significant to the research project.

The handbook is a gathering together of several wayfaring crafts based scholars across the globe into one ‘knot’. It is a celebration of craft from Indigenous, Asian, European, North American, South American, Australia and New Zealand contexts. These scholars provide a rigorous and passionate exploration of the diverse craft-based methods, pedagogies, and range of theoretical lenses they engage with in their research. The chapters demonstrate transdisciplinary approaches to research and pedagogy through crossing disciplinary boundaries and combining academic disciplines and rich theoretical conversations with practical, non(traditional)-academic knowledge to respond to complex real-world problems. Because this book is about making, the authors provide powerful, engaging and useful images as visual text. There are seven sections in the handbook, although with such creative and theoretical work there is also much crossover. The first section is a series of introduction chapters to key thinking about craft histories, craft pedagogies, craft as embodied practiced and a way to connect, crafting as becoming otherwise and craft as bodily thinking. Section two is a focus on Crafting with ancestors, Section three Crafting as decolonial activism, Section four Crafting as pedagogy, Section five Crafting professional identity, Section six Crafting as feminist practice and Section seven Crafting as healing. The Handbook provides a significant marker, a ‘stake in the ground’, to establish a definitive position for craft as method in scholarly practice and an invitation for other craft wayfarers to gather.

The book is intended for scholars and researchers across disciplines engaged in complex societal issues, including Indigenous, qualitative, decolonial, narrative, postqualitative, critical, practitioner and feminist researchers; for students at all levels of study (undergraduate, Masters, postgraduate); and for more established scholars in academia and other sectors. In is an invite to make.