The Partnership Quilt by Angelika Strohmayer
On Tuesday, 18 May at 11:30am PST the Wearable Narratives directed-research group at DXARTS hosted a virtual talk and book presentation entitled "The Partnership Quilt" by researcher Angelika Strohmayer.
The book 'Digitally Augmenting Traditional Craft Practices for Social Justice: The Partnership Quilt' weaves together disparate worlds of crafting, social justice, and digital technologies around The Partnership Quilt. It crafts a manifesto for meaningful action and design processes in charitable organizations through participatory sewing and its digital augmentation. The book charts a history of how sewing has been used to voice concerns of oppression, and how digital technologies can be embedded into textiles to tell stories more powerfully. It explores the relationship between quilting and research, looking beyond the seams of The Partnership Quilt to shed light on the importance of invisible work behind such participatory, justice-oriented design projects. It concludes with a discussion of the impacts and potential future avenues for research on digitally quilting social justice. In the talk, Angelika presents the main points of the book, focusing on how we can develop shared praxes of hope by layering collaborative craft practices with local histories, digital technologies, and meanings of social justice.
A few words about Angelika:
Dr Angelika Strohmayer (Twitter: @tripsandflips_ // @fempowertech) is a lecturer and co-director of the newly established Design Feminisms Research Group at Northumbria University’s School of Design. Her collaborative in-the-world work sits at the intersection of technologies, craft, social justice, and feminisms - contributing to theoretical conversations through applied research methods. She is dedicated to the inclusion of under- and mis-represented people in research, design, and academia, and proactively works towards equity, diversity, and inclusion. Some of this is shown through her work as a founding member of fempower.tech, an international technology research collective, and her co-editing of the ‘Meaningful Design Processes’ Forum in the ACM Interactions Magazine. In all that she does, Angelika tries to work across boundaries, bringing together disparate groups to engage in endeavours that support personal wellbeing, counteracting community traumas, and engaging in public advocacy to move towards more socially just worlds.
