Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

experiences and how such writing practices structured interpretative strategies for film reception. Lastly, by
analysing spectators/readers’ practices among marginal areas such as battle fields, it will conclude that
collecting and reading movie theater brochures could be considered as vicarious film experiences in urban
life.
3J
Making Change – textiles, gender and power (Chair, Prudence Black)
In the face of the many challenges facing humanity today, both great and small, artists and activists alike are
endlessly asking one question: What can I do to make a difference? This panel brings together a group of three
practitioners who use textiles to explore the potential power of the hand-made to address issues of social, political
and environmental justice.
Margaret Mayhew
Material Entanglements: Craftivism, relationally and critique
This paper is reflection on how the practice of feminist ‘craftivism’ constitutes itself beyond extra mural sites
of community art across the walled spaces of state confinement. The paper draws on existing critiques by
Bratish and Brush in 2011 and Carpenter in 2010 of the celebratory complacency underpinning some popular
narratives of craftivism, that do not facilitate a critical engagement with the social relations or political
affiliations in which craft and craftivism is entangled. In questioning the assumptions underpinning dominant
narratives of craftivism (See Greer 2014, Corbett 2013, ) that there is something inherently activist,
progressive or feminist in the circulation of handmade items in public or activist spaces, I draw on my own
craftivist practice and examine a range of textile based works by Australian artists and craftivists in order to
interrogate the entanglements of relationality and materiality that underpin our understandings of what is
constituted by craftivism.
Tania Splawa-Neyman Making with textiles: practicing care within an ecology of objects
In our current everyday lives, textile based objects, garments and the materials of their making are swiftly
obtained and then inattentively divested with little regard for the part they play in our own, and the living
ecologies of others. As noted by Anne-Marie Willis when discussing ontological changes imparted via design,
“we no longer know how to dwell among things” (Willis 2006, under “From Worlding to Thinging”).
Regarding our ongoing relationships with textiles, objects made from textiles and the act of making itself,
how can these tendencies towards inattentiveness be changed? This question is explored through discussion
of a series of ongoing, durational projects wherein all of the author’s garments — cheap, new, old, wellworn,
loved and unloved — are considered with respect and are duly sustained within the owner’s ecology.
Tal Fitzpatrick Quilting, activism and the Power of the Gift
As a movement, socially-engaged art continues to struggles against the commercialisation of art and the
subsequent subversion of its potency as a medium for activism/political resistance, by avoiding the creation
of art objects as well as other forms of documentation (what Bishop describes as art’s ‘third term’). In
avoiding the creation of physical objects through practices such as ephemeral art, performance art and
relational art, artists have been able to escape the monetisation of their practices. However, a total
avoidance of the object does address the challenge of whether it is possible to create physical artworks that
escapes the political impotence which follows after being absorbed into the neo-liberal capitalist agenda
driving the art market. This paper investigates the potential of the gift, as articulated by Mauss, to act as a
strategy for enabling the creation and sharing of objects that maintain their political integrity. Specifically,
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