"Let me show you"
a caring ethnography of embodied knowledge in weaving and engineering
pp. 175-187
in: Cecilia Åsberg, Rosi Braidotti (eds), A feminist companion to the posthumanities, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
This chapter seeks to comprehend and problematize the metaphor of knowledge as weaving as an entrance to critically understand: mediations, inequalities and differences both within technoscientific knowledge production and in its encounters and dialogues with other knowledges. The starting point of the analysis is derived from the ethnographic component of an interdisciplinary project oriented towards the design of a computer interface inspired by calado, a Colombian embroidery craft; which, given the way in which it is performed, can be understood as a form of weaving. The meeting between the knowhow of craft embroiderers, a knowledge situated in their hands, feminized and precarious, and engineering knowledge, with its codified and legitimate expertise, simultaneously entangles and unravels the practices that sustain epistemic and gendered hierarchies and binaries, embedded as they are in particular geopolitical settings, but also enables possibilities for creativity, reparation and the reinvention of these embodied orders, their temporalities and daily concreteness.