Craft psychology has gained traction in recent years. Studies focus on mental health and well-being (Bukhave et al., 2025; Kirketerp, 2024), tapping into a neoliberal agenda that individualizes mental health and views coping as the sufferer’s responsibility, while reducing craft to a ”technical fix”. Although community aspects of craft in learning settings are also part of the agenda (Kirketerp, 2024) it is an add-on which further taps into the decontextualized neoliberal wellness agenda. In this paper I suggest an approach to craft that focuses on the potential for resistance and change inherent, but widely unnoticed in craft. Historically, especially textile craft, is the unheeded art of the oppressed: women, marginalized ethnic groups, and the working class – more often than not intersecting (Leone, 2021). However, historical examples from e.g. the French revolution and the resistance movement of WWII, show that, not only can knitting hold encoded messages, but it can also be the center of strong communities of resistance. A recent example is the Crochet Coral Reef, a collective effort, started by Christine and Margaret Wertheim, and cited by Haraway (2017) as a powerful comment on climate change.

Drawing on anthropology and new materialism, I wish to expand craft psychology beyond the mere solitary, recreational, and coping imaginaries that seem to stick, even in the celebration of craft. With concepts such as Haraway’s String Figures (2016), Manning’s Minor Gestures (2020), and Ingold’s Skill (2021), I wish to address how we may understand craft as a more-than-human multiple endeavor with vast potential for resistance and change.

References:

Bukhave, E. B., Creek, J., Linstad, A. K., & Frandsen, T. F. (2025). The effects of crafts‐based interventions on mental health and well‐being: A systematic review. Australian Occupational Therapy Journal, 72(1), e70001-n/a. https://doi.org/10.1111/1440-1630.70001

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Ingold, T. (2021). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New edition.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003196662

Minor Gesture (pp. 64–85). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822374411-005

Kirketerp, A. (2024). Craft psychology : how crafting promotes health (1. editing). Mailand.

Leone, L. (Ed.). (2021). Craft in art therapy : diverse approaches to the transformative power of craft materials and methods (1st ed.). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Manning, E. (2020). Weather Patterns: or How Minor Gestures Entertain the Environment. In The Minor Gesture (pp. 64–85). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822374411-005

In The sane society, written in 1968, robotization was for Erich Fromm primarily not a question of machines replacing humans. Rather, he saw the problem in human beings becoming machinelike in their everyday lives. In a recent debate on whether we have outsourced our thinking to technology too much, the leader of University of Oulu’s research program "Hybrid intelligence" articulated the present situation of humanity by saying that AI will not replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without AI. Paying attention to unique human capabilities (such as “empathy”) Järvelä and her colleagues (2023), envision a good future in relation to human-AI collaboration, creating efficient teaching and learning, that would eventually lead to more just world and more equally distributed possibilities.

In such human-AI collaboration it is important to pay attention to the way in which “unique human capabilities” are articulated. I begin with a description of robotization as described by Fromm in The Sane Society and in The revolution of Hope, proceeding to his articulation of what is specifically human, and how it relates to possibilities that technology had brought about in the 1960’s. Further, I describe hope in Fromm’s vocabulary as a particular kind of experience. As other experiences, also hope is for Fromm something that is difficult to put into words. He suggests that poetry, music and other forms of art are “by far the best-suited media for describing human experience because they are precise and avoid the abstraction and vagueness of worn-out coins which are taken for adequate representations of human experience” (Fromm, 1968, p. 13). Following this Idea, I describe a Finnish folksong that ends up in desperation, into a hopeless situation. Scrutinizing the textual and other moments of the song, I finally conclude in articulating the hope as joint and conscious experience of hopelessness.

During this session we will listen to an audio collage composed of data collected as part of the research project “Cultures of Listening in Crisis: enhancing professional listening to adults and children in situations of need/risk”. This invites you to listen to your own listening, i.e. listen darkly, and explore what you do with what you hear.

The method of dark listening (Motzkau, under review), was developed to explore the permanent crisis in UK child protection practice, evident in troubled listening spots indicating this to be a crisis of listening (Motzkau & Lee 2022). In 2024/25, participants (20 UK social workers) self-recorded audio diaries, reporting day-to-day experiences of listening and being listened to within professional practice. Excerpts from these diaries were selected, re-recorded by voices actors, and the recordings used to compose an audio collage, in collaboration with a sound artist. This collage was used as a prompt at Listening Workshops attended variously by groups of social workers, senior managers and policy makers, to initiate safe reflection, discussion and transformative collaborative thinking about the meaning of listening; as well as about the levers and barriers to productive listening within social work and wider safeguarding practice. These sessions were recorded and analysed further.

‘Dark’ is commonly seen to have a negative connotation: e.g. ‘dark net’; ‘dark empaths’.

This traditional evocativeness of the dark as bad/uncanny is itself a result of the way dominant discourses obscure the minor, the other, the inaudible, diverting our attention from it to return us to the safe binary of enlightened insight (light equals good), implicitly bolstered by colonial epistemologies. If this is true, I suggest that we need to reclaim ‘dark’ as a realm of critique/emancipatory action. This means turning from the visible to the audible, to listening; we need to consider the inaudible, the dark in listening, as something that denotes/holds the obscured, the unenlightened, that is, phenomena and experiences that are not thrown into relief by traditional pattens of sense making/knowing, but that resonate within; that are continuously unheard, unable to speak within our listening.

The participatory method of dark listening (Motzkau, under review) is inspired by ‘Audio Obscura’, an artwork by Lavinia Greenlaw (2011). She defines dark listening as ‘listening to what you cannot hear’, a way of attending to “the point at which we start to make sense of things”; with Audio Obscura “an attempt to arrest and investigate that moment, to separate its components and test their effects” (ibid, 2011, p. 7). Similarly, as a method, dark listening is an intervention that temporarily suspends/arrests participants’ motions of sense making and thereby makes them listen to their own listening, i.e. it alerts them to the cultures of listening they employ/are embedded in, opening them up to scrutiny (Motzkau & Lee 2022).

Listening to the collage, as well as presenting data and analysis from this research, this talk will consider the politics of listening (Bassel 2022) and analysis in research and practice, and the implications of re-presenting/performing and composing with sensitive data, with participants in a participatory manner (Sotelo-Castro & Shapiro-Phim, 2018).

For sound artist Dylan Robinson, decolonising listening involves listening otherwise, that is, becoming aware of how normative listening habits and abilities are guided by our listening positionality. This positionality is shaped by perceptual habit, ability, and bias. In his book, Hungry Listening (2020), Robinson demonstrates how the dominant Western (Settler) approach to listening is extractive in nature; it desires certitude and feeds on the satisfaction that comes from being able to identify, recognise, and catalogue with some semblance of certainty to whom and/or to what we are listening. He calls this “hungry listening”, which is also a “listening for”: markedly devoid of any relationality. In contrast, “listening otherwise” is always a listening-with. It is a process of listening that is committed to receiving “otherness” and it intentionally engages with the unfamiliar, strange, and not already understood. Listening otherwise thereby requires a suspension of our belief in the certainty of knowing what listening actually is. This paper explores the process of decolonising listening through the phenomenon of the staged Radio Play. Written to be performed theatrically on stage as an imaginary radio drama, the live radio play mimics the format of a classic radio drama, complete with sound effects (Foley) produced in real-time in front of an audience, to create a show that combines the auditory experience of radio with the visual aspects of a theatrical performance. Focusing on Stage Foley as Sonic Fiction, I explore the process of making strange or unlearning listening as it relates to this artistic genre and provide some modest offerings as to how this might move us from hungry listening to listening otherwise in an attempt to decolonise listening.