 Hello, so welcome to one of our in conversations on the topic of material method so hopefully you've seen the first in the series. But just in case not this is a series of conversations around different projects and different academics who use what might be understood to be material methods. And so very excited today we have a kind of slightly different format and it's a collective research collective and stitching together with us which is Emma and Amy. So just to introduce myself in case you don't know who I am my name is Sophie Woodward I'm a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester based in the sociology department and unsurprisingly I have an interest in material methods and wrote a book about it this year which is one of the impetus for this and so over two stitching together if you'd like to introduce yourselves individually because I think we'll have lots of chance to talk about the collective today. So my name is Emma Shercliff and I'm a senior lecturer in textiles at the Arts University in Bournemouth. And I'm Amy Twigler Holroyd associate professor of fashion and sustainability at Nottingham Trent University. Okay, great thank you so a lot of people watching this will be familiar with stitching together some people won't be familiar with it and but an obvious place for us to start is if you could tell us about what stitching up is and in particular that we're interested in methods here from the perspective of methods. Yeah, so we coordinate the stitching together network and the network brings together people who facilitate participatory textile making workshops and projects in loads of different settings, including as a form of academic research. And so within our scope we include every different kind of participatory textile making activity that might be knitting sewing weaving crochet printing the list goes on and on. And they might be organized in many different ways so from a short drop in workshop where people just come along and have a go at something for a short time through to really kind of extended projects that might be with a particular group. Over a really long period of time, and also activities that are coordinated online so the togetherness of the stitching might be kind of virtual, which of course have grown in activity a lot in in recent months. And through developing the network we found that textile making activities are being used to explore really diverse research questions and to generate data in really different ways. So we use stitching together and participatory textile making as an umbrella term that describes an approach to research rather than a specific method or even a family of methods. To give some idea of the scope and the breadth and some of the examples that we've become familiar with might include the HRC funded S4S project and designing a sensibility for sustainable clothing. Led by Professor Fiona Hackney and her team, and they coordinated a variety of textile making workshops as a means to explore attitudes towards garment life cycles. And they might include the social studio, which is based in Melbourne Australia founded by Grace McQuilton, and they offered their roots to training and employment for people from refugee and migrant backgrounds. What's really interesting about the work that researchers have done there is the work highlights how these shared making activities where both researchers and research subjects teach and learn processes together. And that sharing can challenge some perhaps more traditional researcher subject hierarchies. Very interesting to follow that. Another might be Sarah Brown, a researcher slash embroidery, whose field work in Madagascar involved her using her own skills stitching skills to learn a different craft that of re-dweaving. She socially organized making activities that she was involved in point towards a different quality of interaction with other craftspeople and therefore generate different understandings of the significance of those crafts to the people who practice them. And to flag up there are many more examples that we have discussed at length and in detail in the stitching together dedicated two part special edition of the Journal of Arts and Communities, which will contain 15 case studies of different projects in and across to two issues. It's really interesting to hear about that kind of diversity of uses to and also the kind of global context as well because I think obviously that speaks to a different element of it as well so it's really interesting to hear about that and also maybe points towards some of the potentials for extending it as a method. I'm really interested then to think a little bit about you know as you've said it's kind of a set of methods but how it is then that you've come to these methods so whether that is either kind of personally or academically or both how it is that you've ended up with this kind of project. Summer and I met while we were both doing our PhDs at different universities, but around the same time and we discovered this kind of shared approach that we were both making textiles with people as a means of research. For both of us, this was informed and inspired by previous professional experience as designers and as facilitators of textile making activities, so we kind of moved from a professional experience into an academic one. So I'd run my own knitwear label and then branched out into running knitting workshops and projects which then developed into my research into people's experiences of some of those things. And Emma had been working with community groups on a series of participatory projects that included stitched works and rug making so on a similar a similar story really that that's professional practice kind of raising research questions and leading into doctoral research. So yeah when we started our PhDs we were bringing those skills and those kind of understandings to the projects and found that there wasn't much if any literature to help us think about how to develop a methodology based on the activities that we knew that we could do and that would generate such interesting stuff, like how to generate the data, how to analyze the data, how to argue for the validity and rigor of what we were doing. So we waddled our way through but the network is really an effort to sort of more coherently develop critical understandings of these kind of participatory making activities by bringing people together to share their experiences, the challenges they've encountered and their ideas for how these things can develop. I think that's really interesting to hear so you've talked a lot about the kinds of you know methods and in obvious ways I think these are very material but I just wondered if you could speak maybe a bit more explicitly to that because obviously this is a series of conversations on material so either material methods are using materiality as a method or methods to understand materiality. Could you speak just a bit more specifically to how stitching together might be understood as a kind of material method or series of material methods? Sure. Well, yes, I mean we think there are lots of links with the ideas that you've developed around material methods. Making textiles with other people can be a really productive way of understanding their experiences of that activity in the moment. So it's a way of being able to capture people's reflections, their thoughts, their responses in the moment rather than waiting until afterwards in a very different setting and collecting that data for example. It's an efficient way for you to, as Amy was doing to explore ways of learning how people learn to practice a craft, learn to knit or learn to sew. It can also bring out all sorts of insights into experiences related to textiles but not necessarily just making textiles. It could be insights into experiences of owning textiles or using textiles in a daily basis, living with textiles more broadly. That could be in both a social setting or a cultural context. And perhaps less obviously we're finding that participatory textile making activities can also be used to investigate things which aren't directly linked either to craft making activities or textiles. Because they're so good at creating a space for rich dialogue and exploring the granular detail of a particular area of interest. They're methods that really get into the corners of people's lives that perhaps some other methods can't. So to give an illustration of this perhaps the work of Rian Solomon, an artist maker, designer. She's initiated collaborative workshops with breast reconstruction patients and surgeons to the place to facilitate dialogue around these very different perspectives of illness and treatment for breast cancer. So yeah, there are lots of ways I think that these methods connect with your idea of material methods. Yeah, I mean I can see that and I'm really interested in what you're saying at the end about how you know it can give you insight into all sorts of other things that maybe you wouldn't expect and you know it's not just about obviously clothing in itself is a fascinating thing but also it's such an interesting route methodologically into all sorts of other things. So yeah, really interesting and that kind of feeds into a question I'd like to ask actually about disciplines and disciplinarity because I think by definition like material methods are interdisciplinary. We know so many different disciplines that they fall within and I think that's a really interesting thing to think about how much particular methods are specific to disciplines or how much they are able to translate or speak across. So I wondered if you could answer that in terms of your own disciplinary backgrounds and how much you think the kind of methods that you develop through stitching together or particular to that or kind of translate beyond discipline. Yeah, it's a really, really good question so we both teach fashion and textiles and we both research within an art and design context. So for us as a really kind of clear link between the making methods that we're discussing and the kind of topics that we're researching and the things that we're teaching. So one of the most striking things about participatory textile making is how it's being used by people from very different disciplinary backgrounds. And that's what we kind of are unearthing more and more and more through the work of the network is what we think we know that it's quite diverse and then more people come along we're like, well, okay, it's even more diverse than we thought. And we think that's probably because textile making is such a widespread accessible and flexible activity. So it's kind of relevant to people's lives in so many different ways, but it kind of makes it so flexible. You can do textile making in a very, it's very easy to set up you don't need a lot of stuff so it can be very kind of accessible in terms of people having a go with this. So a few examples just to kind of illustrate that diversity. The work of Jessica Jacobs. So she's a geographer and a filmmaker who's been exploring approaches to mapping tribal boundaries in the Middle East. And she's an area of gender bias. So in a community that restricts women's interactions in public. She wasn't reaching them with the filmmaking methods that she was using. And came up with the idea of using embroidery as an alternative way of kind of accessing women's perspectives. So her doctoral research is in the field of psychology. And she's exploring the value of craft in dementia care. So closer to craft, but definitely very much within the discipline of psychology. And then another example, which is about, I suppose, different disciplines working together. So Stephanie Bun, who's a social anthropologist, did a case study for us recently. A really interesting project where she'd been working with colleagues from a whole range of disciplines to investigate the mathematics of basketry making, and they're kind of making together and you know bringing those those different, very different areas of knowledge together through the process of making. Great. I mean, it's really interesting to hear that kind of diversity and how much you know, I mean, I am currently a sociologist but I have worked not on design as well but I can certainly see how how many things it speaks to even within disciplines like social science disciplines and I think that's something that I think a lot of people who watch this will be social scientists and I think they'll be really interested in thinking about it from lots of different perspectives and you know like sociology or anthropology certainly which I mentioned a little bit. The last question I'd like to ask is, what do you think the future of the method is? Where do you think this could lead kind of after this? We've heard a lot about what you've done but I'd be really interested to think about where you think it could be going. Yes, and I think we've also indicated that there's you know there is a lot more that can be developed. To start with, as we've said already, I think we'd call it more of an approach rather than strictly just a method because there is so much diversity, both in the format, the scale of these works, the reach, the tools, the techniques, the context and of course the research questions. It's a very vibrant area of research that we've discovered and there is a lot of enthusiasm from all those who've been working with us in the network for doing more research in this area and for using this approach in research. We currently have over 60 network members and as Amy's indicated as well from across a very wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, plus additional contributors, critical friends and interested collaborators. There's willingness and enthusiasm there, but there is a real need to develop stronger critical understandings, both about the doing of it but also about how these approaches can be used and developed. Also to discuss the many challenges that arise because yes there are lots of lots of really exciting and positive contributions that people are making, but there are challenges that do arise when you're researching in this way. And we are doing some thinking around this. For example, people working with vulnerable groups using textile making methods. This could, this can present ethical challenges. Of course, they need to be thought about really carefully. Disseminating research findings that are actually embedded in creative and expressive media. You know that presents a challenge for researchers as well. Maintaining the integrity of the project as research, whilst at the same time keeping all these multiple partners happy in a project. That's a challenge. So there's a lot of work still to do I think in those areas. And one of the key outputs of the network, the stitching together network, which we hope will help with some of this is our new good practice guidelines document. These guidelines provide advice for facilitators of participatory techniques are making workshops and projects, both in research context but also in non research settings. So for example, working in community groups with art centres and so on. So these have been these guidelines been informed by input from over 30 network members and critical friends are drawing on, you know, whole range of experiences, and a lot of stored knowledge. So that's very exciting. The guidelines themselves cover give advice around all sorts of things from devising the making activities in the first instance, and thinking about what resources might be needed right through to the dissemination and the after care, both the after care of the project but also the after care of the research. And all the way through there's an emphasis on ethical practice and inclusivity so we have done lots of learning there is more to do along with the publication will be continuing to coordinate opportunities for network members and others to come together and share the resources talk about the methods and the approaches that they've used, and we're very keen for people to use a good practice guidelines in their practice and to feed back to us so we've we've conceived these as a foundational structure for these types of activities. But of course it's a starting point we want to encourage innovation flexibility in the application of these these methods. We want to hear about it want to see now where can these go how can we develop this further. So it's very exciting. Lots of work still to do. That's for sure. That's great. I think it, I think the good practice guidelines will be brilliant actually because I imagine there's a lot of people who are super interested but not really sure how to maybe do it and I think particularly coming from social sciences and I think that will be really helpful for them so that's really good to hear. And okay well thanks very much it's been really interesting to hear from stitching together and I think we'll all really look forward to hearing what happens next so thank you very much.