Crafting Connections: Creating Counterspaces to Academic Diversity Labour

Abstract

In this piece we discuss the workspace precarities of women of colour academics in higher education in the United States between the early 2000s and early 2020s and share some thinking about how one might labour beyond institutional structures of diversity. In particular, we offer an argument for the importance of counterspaces to the institutions that employ them and the power of collective labour outside institutional structures (in this case, sewing and quilting) for weathering shifting institutional priorities and labour inequities. We offer insights into why it might be necessary for women of colour academics to cultivate a relationship to emotional labour that is productive when it is collective and crafted away from workplace policies. We explore how crafting provides such an opportunity for what we describe as Non-Professional Productive Labour.

Keywords:

• crafting
• faculty diversity
• higher education
• emotional labour
• counterspace
• non-professional productive labour

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Edward Blum, the conservative legal strategist and founder of Students for Fair Admissions, has stated that he intends to bring the same attacks against considerations of race and ethnicity to the US corporate sphere next (Garcia-Navarro 2023).

2 We realize that the landscape of higher education is not monolithic; questions of diversity and inclusion look different in various institutional contexts (e.g., Minority Serving Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 2-year colleges, For-profit Institutions, etc.). Likewise, most institutions include a variety of administrators, staff, faculty, and students. We believe our observations—as teaching faculty who worked for a predominantly white institution in the early part of our respective academic careers—about diversity labour could be fruitfully explored from a variety of contexts and positions within the academy.

3 As we were crafting this piece, we were aware of the recent easing of the line between fine art and craft. This raised a number of questions for us that we do not address including: how craft’s association with the domestic and feminine, and with racialized populations served to marginalise a large swatch of creative labour; and, relatedly, how to situate the role that ‘marginalized modes of artistic production’ (Whitney Museum of American Art 2022) are now playing in diversifying the art-world and challenging established canons of product and method. One wonders, however, if the fine art world will have a similar relationship to ‘diversity’ that we think through in this piece.

4 See also Claire Bettershill’s Women and Letterpress Printing (2022) for a history of women and printing culture from the 1920s to the early twenty-first century.

5 Here I draw on Mieke Bal’s discussion of interruption as a necessary first step to turn one’s attention to something (2018).