Crafting Futures is an ongoing British Council funded project which addresses the global threat to intangible heritage; as researchers in the School of Communication, RCA, our role has been to co-create methods for knowing with, not knowing about, the largely tacit community knowledge of craft and its surrounding networks of meaning; From 2019 we have worked with craftspeople within Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to generate visual and sonic narratives; at the centre of our research methodology is the imperative of countering and moving beyond naturalised colonial assumptions about what counts as knowledge. The project methods arose from discussions and image/sound making workshops with craft leaders, practitioners and intergenerational craftspeople. We have found the ideas of De Santos (2018, 2016) and Appadurai (2006), useful in bringing mindfulness to the assumptions, power relations and biases of our backgrounds, the idea of Knowing With (de Sousa Santos, 2018, 15) not knowing about, has informed the way we have co-designed, framed and run the workshops and discussions which we will present in the proposed visual and sonic essay. As Appadurai (2006) states, research risks remaining an elite process and is ‘normally seen as a high-end, technical activity, available by training and class background to specialists in education, the sciences and related professional fields. It is rarely seen as a capacity with democratic potential, much less as belonging to the family of rights’ (Appadurai, 2006). We have aimed to prioritise the Right to Research (Appadurai, 2006) for all those we have worked with. At the same time, we are acutely aware of the dangers of idealising our own methodology, and the construct of participatory practice. We are anxious, therefore, not to frame the actions and discussions we have held with participants as ‘data’ to be harvested. Our visual/sonic essay will present that work and its processes while also addressing key questions:
+ How was this knowledge generated and for whom?
+ How does the role of community affect the generation of knowledge?
+ How can communities counter cultural & economic isolation and foster new networks of knowledge?