Lace, Life and Lore: Crafting Women’s Digital Stories

Background

Thanks to funding from UCC’s Collective Social Futures, this project is a collaborative undertaking between UCC Women’s Studies and the Traditional Lace Makers of Ireland throughout the period 2025. Its starting point acknowledges feminism’s uneasy relationship with craft, while recognizing that crafting and craftivism / crafty activism have been and are still critical to women’s meaning making, identity formation, social connection, intergenerational learning, relational creativity, community practice, DIY citizenship, activism, resistance, health and wellbeing, and creative economy.  It involves collaborating to exhibit lace making and to undertake a participatory digital story project. The digital story collection derived from the project will be showcased but also preserved and prepared for archiving.

The goals of the project are to:

• celebrate women’s lace making and to create digital stories derived from women’s lace making and their lace creations and to preserve these stories for the women themselves and for future use;
• create a resource for further exploring the human-material-environmental entanglements in women’s lace making as craft practice;
• deepen learning and enhance skill development on the MA Women’s Studies Programme.

Method

There will be a Digital Storytelling Facilitation and Skills Development Day-long preparatory workshop. This will provide an opportunity to delve into theorizing crafting and craftivism, focusing on crafting, identity and materiality as well as learn the required skills in story telling facilitation, computer software, story design, video editing, photography and production techniques, in order to create, edit, and produce short videos. The workshop will be followed by the Digital Story Telling Days. These will involve facilitated story telling circles for the story tellers prior to the actual lace-led storytelling. In a safe and respectful environment, each participating lacemaker will tell a short story pertinent to their craft and / or their creation. With permission, each storyteller will be photographed as will their lace creation. The active working phase of the project will be January to June 2025. 

The Team

Dr Elizabeth Kiely (Project Lead), Dr Armida De La Garza, Dr Evelien Geerts, Dr Elizabeth (Liz) Kyte, Dr Brenda Mondragon Toledo, the MA Women’s Studies Students, UCC’s Digital Scholarship Studio Team: Martin O'Driscoll and Declan Synnott, and the Traditional Lace Makers of Ireland.