Taking CARE: building community assets through creative-making

Abstract

CARE stands for ‘community asset-based research and enterprise.’ An Arts & Humanities Research Council funded project, it aims to test and develop a methodology for co-produced community learning through creative practice that builds dialogue, promotes self-reflection and reflexivity. The research focuses on hobby crafts: activities such as knitting, crochet, embroidery, woodworking, metalwork, quilting, lace-making, that are undertaken voluntarily for pleasure and involve high levels of ingenuity, competence and creativity. They represent an important area of community assets and strengths; skills, knowledge, expertise and capabilities that are often devalued or dismissed but which, if recognised, might be developed and applied more widely through volunteering, training, community activism, small business or social enterprise. An initial pilot project has been completed with community participants in Birmingham and Cornwall, and the results recorded in a series of short films. This paper explores the methods and outcomes of that pilot study, explaining how the CARM model will be scaled up to connect the initial participants with groups in Dublin and Sweden.

Action research (Crouch & Pearce 2012), participatory practice (Ledwith & Springett 2010), visual methodologies (Rose 2007), digital storytelling (Lambert 2002), co-produced creative processes (Matarasso 1997), and making as a component of material culture and design ethnography (Miller 2008), provide a framework for thinking about processes of making, talking, sharing and connecting. CARE, additionally, draws on Richard Sennett’s (2013) recent observations about diaolgical and dialectical modes of communication. Using a ‘call and response’ method of sharing and connecting through making – a form of ‘material consequences’ - the groups will develop ‘buddy relationships’ as ‘material penfriends’ connect, respond and reflect by sharing digital and material artefacts. A range of tools and resources, including short films, oral recordings, ‘making boxes’ (box of tricks), drawings, digital sketch-books, visual storytelling, podcasts and diaries, will be employed to help participants explore, communicate and reflect on the deeper meanings and potential bound up in hobby crafts.

A third of the world population is now connected through social media and the internet yet, as Sherry Turkle observes, the more connected we become the less we seem to engage and interact. Connecting and sharing through crafting and making, this paper argues, can forge deeper, more meaningful relationships that combat isolation and promote individual and community agency. Handicrafts, the purest form of hobby activities according to hobbies historian Steven Gelber (1999), offer opportunities for an integrated participatory methodology that both grows from the grassroots and has the potential to be scaled up; applied to other ‘communities of interest’ such as sports clubs, business groups, ecological societies, performers, dance enthusiasts or gardeners (Wenger 2002). Having confidence in one's own abilities is a powerful position from which to take on new skills, and a belief in the value of intergenerational and cross-cultural skill-sharing through applied learning (learning through doing) between community participants and the project team underpins CARM’s co-creational ethos.