Report: Craft as Method Workshop in St. Louis, Senegal
In early November 2022, a Crafts workshop, sponsored by CHCI and organized by GAEC-Africa (The Group for Action and Critical Study, including faculty and students of Gaston Berger University, professionals and neighbors), and WARC (The West African Research Center, located in Dakar, which welcomes local and visiting students and scholars), in conjunction with HAB (Humanities Across Borders, an initiative of the International Institute for Asian Studies that seeks to promote innovative pedagogies) was held in St. Louis, Senegal. It brought together West African crafts people who shared their life stories and demonstrated their crafts—clay pottery from the Casamance, Ghanaian glass bead making, Senegalese reverse glass painting, woven beads, fashion designing, and music making. Likewise scholars, thinkers, poets, translators from West Africa, Asia, and beyond offered critical perspectives on a range of topics: identity, access to and use of archives, multilingualism and translation, art as technique for imagining diaspora, stories for empowerment rather than for the market, art as method: e.g. time in the making of indigo, and the anthropocene as family.
We encourage CHCI members to explore the workshop's summary (pdf) and robust website, featuring other reports, photographs, and videos such as the one below, that further provide a sense of the diverse audiences and impacts of this gathering.