Interconnected Futures: Material practices and knowledge-based systems in the academy

Abstract

More than ever, the role of textile design in environmental, economic, and social crises globally is being revealed. This presents a challenge to activate textile design towards positive change through centring practices that are relational, place-based, and deeply attuned to justice and the wellbeing of our planet: Areas of concern that have been embedded in indigenous ways of Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa for over a millennium. However, as wāhine who whakapapa Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa and Pākehā, we are experiencing tensions when we facilitate authentic knowledge-based systems and material practices that were once naturally entangled to nature, people, and the wellbeing of society.

Within this contribution, we will consider the shifting, re-wiring, and co-creation of our ways of practicing and teaching textile design towards interconnected futures. To do this, we will reflect from the position of our interconnected identities and their entanglement with our scholarly and teaching practices within the academy. And how we might embody the necessary attitudes required to practice, co-create, and maintain the resilience of our ways towards a more ‘just’ future for Aotearoa and its place among Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa. We will be mindful, throughout, in perceiving our ways and tools as ‘alternative’, for these have a distinct genealogy but have not traditionally been validated within academic institutions.