Handcrafted Coalitions: Tantear beyond Borders through Digital Mapping

forthcoming

When we hear about migration and asylum, we usually think of struggles at border crossings, extensive bureaucratic procedures, and the precarious situation of migrants. We rarely think of the objects handcrafted by people on the move, the knowledge these objects entail, what these objects make possible, and the stories these objects tell about the journeys of people on the move. HANDigiCRAFT takes an innovative step by paying attention to objects handcrafted by people on the move and the relations knitted around them, both of which remain unseen by conventional concepts and methods. In asking what the social life of objects handcrafted by people on the move is, HANDigiCRAFT reframes handcrafting as a knowledge practice that mediates social relations beyond borders. It theorizes such relations by developing the concept of handcrafted coalitions; temporary or permanent everyday alliances and achievements between actors engaging with objects handcrafted by people on the move. HANDigiCRAFT thus creates a new method: Tantear handcrafted coalitions. Tantear can be loosely translated from Spanish as 'collectively knowing through the hands'. I draw on this notion to combine it with ethnographic methods and digital mapping. Hence, upcycled clocks in Greece, crafted jewelry in Spain, and paper sculptures in Colombia will be made digitally legible to map their trajectories and learn from their journeys. An interactive multimodal platform will render accessible the thus far unknown stories around handicrafts provided by those engaging with them worldwide. The contributions of HANDigiCRAFT include making graspable (textually, visually, and interactively) the meanings that handicrafts entail for their makers and users. Besides advancing discussions of the mobility of humans and non-humans, it materializes generative articulations between STS, migration/border studies, and feminist decolonial thinking to reimagine migration through handcrafting practices and digital methods.