Digitally Augmenting Traditional Craft Practices for Social Justice

This book weaves together the disparate worlds of crafting, social justice, and digital technologies around The Partnership Quilt. It crafts a manifesto for meaningful action and design processes in charitable organizations through participatory sewing, combining traditional crafts with cutting-edge digital technologies. The book charts the history of how sewing has been used across the globe to voice concerns of oppression and marginalization, and how digital technologies can be embedded into textiles to tell stories more powerfully. It explores the relationship between quilting and research, looking beyond the seams of The Partnership Quilt to shed light on the importance of invisible work behind such participatory, justice-oriented design projects. The book further explores the various pragmatic and metaphorical meanings of the quilt, and how this information is woven into the fabrics and wires that make it an interactive piece of art. It concludes with a discussion of the impacts and potential future avenues for research about digitally quilting social justice.