As an anthropologist teaching at a German-speaking Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology Department, it always struck me, how much we know about the role embodiment plays in and for culture and how little we then make use of this in teaching. For this reason, for the course I presently teach entitled DIY in Times of Crisis and Beyond, I decided to go the pedagogical extra mile, putting the making at the heart of it all. Deliberately creating a space of epistemic uncertainty which allows for “collateral exploration, diversions and imaginings” (Martinez et al 2021), we develop our thinking from tool-guided making. We (temporarily) marginalize the intellectual realm and allow it to gain momentum peripherally while stitching away on our embroidery loops.
Building on Hackney and Setterington (2022) and their use of the concept of “bloom space” (Stewart 2010), I will give insights into how crafting while thinking and vice versa within an academic teaching context serves as a low-threshold approach for students to learn to think, reflect and critique and thus empowers them to develop their own voice without feeling judged. Putting the body and “felt sovereignty” (Cvetkovich 2010) centre stage in a masculine space that has traditionally suppressed the body in favour of reason by bringing tools, materials and crafts into the classroom, offers new ways of experiencing learning as an ever-evolving “feel trip” (Golubchikov 2015) and of creating haptic certainty in biographically and societally disorderly times.
I will furthermore argue that this pedagogical approach not only fosters creativity and imagination but also offers strategies to detox university (Prior 2022), to mitigate social acceleration and instrumentalisation of education and to cultivate self-care. In bringing the body into the knowledge factory, ultimately, we take one step further from making knowledge to crafting wisdom (cf. Martinez et al 2021).
