The Routledge Handbook of Making

The Routledge Handbook of Making: Craft-Based Research Methods and Pedagogy is a book that celebrates the embodied process of craft as method. It uniquely centralises crafting, the practice of doing and making, as significant to the research project. The handbook is a gathering together of several wayfaring crafts-based scholars across the globe into one “knot”. It is a celebration of craft from Indigenous, Asian, European, North American, South American, Australian, and New Zealand contexts. These scholars provide a rigorous and passionate exploration of the diverse craft-based methods, pedagogies, and a range of theoretical lenses they engage with in their research. The chapters demonstrate transdisciplinary approaches to research and pedagogy through crossing disciplinary boundaries and combining academic disciplines and rich theoretical conversations with practical, non(traditional)-academic knowledge to respond to complex real-world problems. Because this book is about making, the authors provide powerful, engaging, and useful images as visual text. There are seven sections in the handbook, although with such creative and theoretical work there is also much crossover. The first section is a series of introductory chapters on key thinking about craft histories, craft pedagogies, craft as an embodied practice and a way to connect, crafting as becoming otherwise, and craft as bodily thinking. Section II focuses on crafting with ancestors, Section III on crafting as decolonial activism, Section IV on crafting as pedagogy, Section V on crafting professional identity, Section VI on crafting as feminist practice, and Section VII on crafting as healing. The handbook provides a significant marker, a “stake in the ground”, to establish a definitive position for craft as a method in scholarly practice and an invitation for other craft wayfarers to gather. The book is intended for scholars and researchers across disciplines engaged in complex societal issues, including Indigenous, qualitative, decolonial, narrative, post-qualitative, critical, practitioner, and feminist researchers; for students at all levels of study (undergraduate, Masters, and postgraduate); and for more established scholars in academia and other sectors. It is an invitation to make.