The Affective Micropolitics of Craftivism: Organizing social change through the minor gesture

While craft foregrounds the material, embodied and affective nature of making practices, it also has capacities as a political resource which recognizes the value of everyday materiality in creating the conditions for change to emerge. In this article, we explore these possibilities by focusing on craftivism, a diffuse social movement that uses traditional craft skills of hand making to address a wide range of complex societal and organizational causes and challenges. We draw on an empirical study of craftivists to explore how they use craft as a political resource to organize change by generating affective relations between people and material objects in physical and online spaces. We argue that minor gestures of craft, developed through practices of reclaiming historically defined, domestic and feminine handcrafts, constitute a distinctive repertoire of contention and enable craftivism as a journey of change in the minor key. This helps us to think about change differently, where making is a form of change itself that is at least as significant as the destination of the resulting change. We thus draw attention to activism that subverts traditionally oppositional approaches to organizing resistance and surfaces complex coalitions directed towards individual, community and societal transformation. Such craft practices subversively bring together the politics of the domestic sphere with broader grand challenges, thereby subtly altering how we perceive traditional means of political engagement and different forms of activism. Our contribution offers deeper understanding of the affective potential of minor gestures of craft from the lived experience of those who use craft as a form of organizing change through creative, material and affective practice. Affective micropolitical acts such as the habits, rhythms and routines of craft are generative in the sense that they attune us to social change in the minor key.