The Craftivist Collective (Bonus Reflections Podcast)

We're back again with more thoughts (and feelings) about last week's episode. What did you think? Are you ready to get crafty? Let us know on Instagram @therevolutionbeginsathome. If you're not on the gram, drop us a review or tweet @hashtagcerys with the hashtag #TheRevolutionBeginsAtHome

Transcript:

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to The Revolution Begins at Home (bonus reflections podcast). My name is Cerys, I’m the producer here at The Revolution Begins at Home and, after each episode, I’m going to be sharing a couple of things the episode made me think about whilst I was helping to make it.

That’s right, I’m back with more thoughts and feelings about activism and its all thanks to last week’s wonderful guest.

The Episode

If you tuned in last week, you will know that our host Chantelle spoke to Sarah Corbett. Sarah is an activist; she has been all throughout her life, ever since she was a kid growing up in Everton. She sat down with us to talk about her experiences working on local community projects and for large organisations, winning and losing, receiving awards and getting burnt out, and all the things she’s learned along the way.

She told us about her strategies as an activist and that really made me realise that I don’t have a strategy when it comes to activism and so maybe I should have one but how do you pick one? I don’t know – no approach is perfect, even sitting down with friends and knitting can have big implications when it comes to fairness and philosophy and how you think the world should work because our actions are not apolitical and even successes can have negative consequences.

Which is quite a lot to take away from the episode given that, mostly, we just talked about craftivism and the kind of gentle, thoughtful, effective protests that Sarah organises through her social enterprise The Craftivist Collective.

Sarah   craftivism, in its simplest form is the word craft and activism mushed up together

And, as we learned in the episode, craftivism in its not so simplest form might be working out what someone on the board of M&S’s favourite colour is so that you can achieve a living wage for its workers. Craftivism can be many things but Sarah uses it specifically and deliberately to make change. She thinks about how the textures of the materials she’s using, or their quality and appearance might make the recipient feel and asks questions like “if it looks like this, is that going to make someone feel curious or will they feel attacked?”, “what about if it looks like this, instead?” and she’s always weighing up the answers to these questions against the cost to the earth. Her activism is carefully planned and environmentally responsible and, boy does it get results.

Canary Craftivists

I participated in one of Sarah’s campaigns this summer.  A climate change campaign called the Canary Craftivists. The conceit behind it is to meet with friends, dressed in yellow, and make small canaries (hand stitched or knitted and filled with recycled materials, if possible) and then send these beautifully handcrafted (or, in my case lopsided but still kinda cute) little warning signs to MPs as part of a mass, gentle protest demonstrating how many of us are concerned about climate change.

I thought that the point of the protest was to get people talking, sort of like a crafternoon, you know? We’d meet up and discuss why we thought it was important to do something over needles and biscuits and then, as an added bonus, send our birds and some letters to our local representatives. And, if this was happening up and down the country, with people who craft or who can’t and with people who are passionate about climate change and those that aren’t, we’d all come away with something – a new skill or perspective or, in my case, a large ball of crochet suitable wool.

I was incorrect. This was not the point of the protest, at all. In fact, as Sarah explained…

Sarah   my summer climate project is a bit counterintuitive for a lot of people because I'm really focused on people who've never done activism before on already part of climate action. And I'm doing a project specifically for them, and particularly people who see themselves as a political or not left leaning, because we've got a conservative government. And so a lot of activist groups. I've been saying please don't do this project because we need higher Conservative government to see that this is a new group who they didn't expect to care about climate so publicly

So, er, that’s not me actually. The point of the protest was not to encourage people like me to have a bit of a catch up and give them something productive to do with their hands in the meantime. I should probably have listened to our interview with Sarah before I got involved because, what I learned during the recording is that I definitely had a couple of misconceptions about Sarah’s work akin to the kind she’s come across before.

Sarah Yeah, you're probably imagining me, you know, sitting away doing a bit of cross stitch saying, make tea, not war.

Essentially, yes. Though, not in a bad way – I imagined the work Sarah was doing as being similar to the kinds of meetings that inspired the creation of the word craftivism in the first place. Sarah told us how craftivism, as a term, was created by craftivist Betsy Greer. When Betsy was studying for her MA in Sociology at Goldsmiths (and writing her dissertation on knitting, no less)[1] back in the early 2000’s she observed the political conversations and organising that was taking place in feminist craft circles and saw the potential in using crafts to engage people in activism. People who couldn’t or didn’t want to go to marches and lock ins and picket lines or, at least, not all the time and needed a way to engage with their feet up and their hands warm.

When, I looked into it, I found lots of groups who fit this kind of mould. Groups like the Knitting Nannas[2] in Australia who turn up at rallies and fracking sites and politicians’ offices and… knit. They have tea parties and craft or play cards or give out ice lollies to protestors and police officers and workers alike and are generally nice and pleasant but also stubborn and disapprove strongly of how we are treating the Earth.

Or the Yarn Mission, a collective knitting for Black Liberation through community building, connection and guidance[3]. They organise knitting meet-ups and teach people how to knit and crochet, all the while building safe spaces to talk about the advancement of justice, rebellion, and the end of oppressive systems often with those not normally involved in activism.

When I thought of craftivism, this is the kind of thing I was imagining – crafts as a facilitator for important conversations and accessible spaces. And Sarah does run workshops and engage in this style of craftivism but she also uses crafts in a different way.

Sarah’s Activism

In many of Sarah’s campaigns, the crafts are a tool for change, not conversation and this is because Sarah’s style of craftivism is not about the craftivist. In fact, Sarah almost exclusively centres the person she is protesting against in her approach. She is a laser-focused, practical activist who starts each project by determining her quantifiable, tangible, achievable objective and then works backwards to her role, which may actually involve taking a step back and letting someone more appropriate do the work that needs to be done.

This means she uses the favourite colours of the person she is protesting, not her own. She works out what quotes inspire them, not her. She gets into their head and tries to figure out why they are doing the thing they are doing and what needs to be done to make them change. And then she does it. Even if that means making a beautiful and bespoke gift for someone denying their workers the living wage or writing a heart-warming and encouraging note to someone buying a piece of fast fashion made in a sweatshop.

Listening to Sarah explain how she needs to see the people she protests against as critical friends, not aggressive enemies or “baddies” and thinks that shouting at people harms more than it helps, I simultaneously strongly agreed with her argument and vehemently disagreed at the same time.

I want to see the best in people and have empathy for their position. I want to pull people into the movements that I feel passionately about and make change together, rather than disempowering them to the point that they no longer matter. I agreed with Sarah when she explained that we are becoming more polarised, that the world feels angrier and more divisive and I have resolved, a thousand times, to approach conversations calmly and kindly and humbly and understand that I might also be wrong.

But then every time I get into the situation itself, I’m like “no, actually, fuck off that’s a disgusting thing to say, how could you even think that? Where is your morality?” but, you know, less articulately and even less helpfully.

And, also, it doesn’t always sit right with me that the person who is doing the bad thing, not to say that they are the “baddy”, but the person who is objectively doing the thing that I think they need to stop doing because they are trying to, I don’t know, make it illegal for me and my friends to use the toilet or because they are poisoning a community’s drinking water for profit, or whatever, that person, I think, why do they deserve kindness and a beautiful gift that took ten hours to make and for someone to tell them that they’ve always known they can do the right thing? Because they haven’t been doing the right thing up until now!

But, then again, if it works… I’m not really in a position to compare the outcome of getting a living wage for M&S employees on the one hand and the fairness of making the people who should and could have done it ages ago feel good about doing it now on the other. Who am I to say to an M&S employee, “sure you can’t afford your rent this month, but at least we have the moral high ground”?

I understand that the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house and that they can only temporarily beat him at his own game[4] but also think that temporarily beating him at his own game can put a lot of food on the table and help a lot of people in desperate need of that temporary win.

So, I think two things simultaneously. That I like this approach and I don’t. That I want to use it and I don’t. That I think it is good and bad.

I also think that Sarah doesn’t think that it’s perfect either. Well, I actually I know this because she said in the interview that it’s not always fair. But it is effective because she picks the battles that she can win. And I don’t mean to imply that these battles are easy, I mean that Sarah picks the battles that she, as the humungous activist nerd that she is, can break down and strategize on and design a campaign to achieve. And then she does, with a laser-focus and decades of experience.

I was surprised when, quite early in the interview, Sarah talked about how she spends quite a lot of time explaining to potential collaborators that she isn’t the activist for them, or that craftivism isn’t the way to go with their campaign. And that’s because Sarah’s philosophy involves having a clear goal and a clear strategy and enough knowledge and research to believe the latter is going to help you achieve the former. She knows there are a lot of different approaches to activism in general and craftivism in particular and it’s important to choose the right one.

So, sometimes, what you need is a knitting circle to vent into. To talk and rage about the injustices of the world and be soothed by your friends and your needles and regain your strength for the next fight. And sometimes what you need is a crochet workshop that will help someone make their first stitch and hear their first Audre Lorde quote. And sometimes what you need is a small craft to make the boss of a company feel special enough that they connect with the thousands of people they are oppressing and you have to be nice to them otherwise nothing will change. And, sometimes, you need a little cross-stitch kit that says “make tea not war” to help spark a conversation with a stranger on a train.

Call to arms

Sarah’s work with the Craftivist Collective has demonstrated that crafts are a powerful tool of gentle protest and that we can make a huge difference with small, deliberate actions.

What I have learned from making this episode, and what I hope that you have learned also, is that, as an activist, you have a tool kit and different types of goals require different tools so we all need to think carefully about what tools we want to use and why.

If you want to get involved in craftivism, there are lots of great resources as craftivist-collective.com.

References

[1] https://craftivism.com/about/

[2] https://knitting-nannas.com/about-us/what-we-do/

[3] http://theyarnmission.com/

[4] https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdf