How Does a Knitted Vagina Work? The Craftivist Response to Current Political Issues through the Utilization of Historically Feminine Crafts
This thesis explores how historically women’s crafts such as needlework and fiber arts have informed acts of political protest with a focus on the craftivist response to contemporary women’s reproductive rights surrounding the Supreme Court Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision (2014). Individuals and organized groups, including Government Free VJJ: Project Snatchel, Knit a Brick, and Wombs on Washington responded to the attempts and legalization of restricting women’s reproductive freedom. I am interested in how contemporary craftivism utilizes the historically feminine mediums of fiber-based craft to further social awareness of political feminine issues. INDEX WORDS: Craftivism, Activism, Knitting, Gender, Women’s Rights, Pro-Choice HOW DOES A KNITTED VAGINA WORK? THE CRAFTIVIST RESPONSE TO CURRENT POLITCAL ISSUES THROUGH THE UTILIZATION OF HISTORICALLY FEMININE CRAFTS
Thinking Through Craft
"This book is a timely and engaging introduction to the way that artists working in all media think about craft. Workmanship is key to today's visual arts, where high "production values" are becoming increasingly commonplace. Yet craft's centrality to contemporary art has received little serious attention from critics and historians. 
Dispensing with cliched arguments that craft is art, Adamson persuasively makes a case for defining craft in a more nuanced fashion. The interesting thing about craft, he argues, is that it is perceived to be "inferior" to art. The book consists of an overview of various aspects of this second-class identity - supplementarity, sensuality, skill, the pastoral, and the amateur. It also provides historical case studies analyzing craft's role in a variety of disciplines, including architecture, design, contemporary art and the crafts themselves." -- Back cover
Discourse Forms and Processes in Indigenous Lowland South America: An Areal-Typological Perspective
▪ Abstract In indigenous lowland South America there are several discourse forms and processes that are shared by groups of people of distinct genetic linguistic affiliations; this leads us to posit this large region, which we label greater Amazonia, as a discourse area, a concept that parallels the notion of linguistic area. The discourse forms and processes we examine are ceremonial dialogue, dialogical performance, templatic ratifying, echo speech, ceremonial greeting, ritual wailing, evidentiality, speech reporting practices, parallelism, special languages, and shamanistic language use. We hypothesize that in lowland South America, discourse is the matrix for linguistic diffusion, i.e., that linguistic areas emerge within discourse areas. What we propose then is a discourse-centered approach to language change and history, parallel to a discourse-centered approach to language structure and use. Our survey includes a plea for a careful archiving of recorded and written materials dealing with lowland So...