Conference Agenda

In theorizing in dark times, how do images help us see—or obscure—what counts as a body, a subject, or a life? This presentation draws from research supported by the Stanley B. Burns, MD, Fellowship for the Study of Medical Photographic History at Yale University, examining 19th-century photographic techniques (daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes) and their entanglement with the evolution of medical epistemology. These early technologies, which materialized the human body through an emerging clinical gaze, offer an entry point into the political stakes of visual theory.

Framing medical imaging as both scientific record and aesthetic performance, the author argues that early medical photography did not merely document illness—it helped define the visual codes by which the body became knowable, governable, and eventually, computable. By tracing the ontological transformation of images—from singular material objects to data-driven, algorithmic entities—this paper explores how visual representation is always already a form of political theory.

Bringing this historical archive into dialogue with contemporary questions around algorithmic vision and surveillance medicine, I ask: What does it mean to theorize images in dark times, when seeing itself is shaped by infrastructures of control? How do arts of seeing—and unseeing—form part of our resistance or complicity? This talk invites reflection on the role of visual theory as both critique and creation, mapping how image-making practices negotiate power, narrative, and embodied knowledge.

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 times characterized by political instability, crisis, and social fragmentation, theory takes on a renewed urgency. It emerges as a form of political engagement: an act that challenges dominant narratives and power relations and opens up the possibility of alternative futures. In this context, our contribution offers an epistemological and methodological reflection on walking as a qualitative research practice, explored in combination with food and consumption practices conceived as everyday, material, and symbolic devices.

Walking with participants through foodscapes is not just a data collection strategy. It constitutes a political gesture that upsets traditional hierarchies of knowledge and promotes a dialogical and situated way of theorizing. At the same time, food—understood as a language of everyday life and means of identity construction—provides access to cultural, individual, and relational dimensions that are often silent. Together, walking and food create an embodied and participatory scene that allows for critical engagement with issues of belonging, exclusion, and recognition.

More than a means of accessing lived experience, this methodological interaction foregrounds food and walking as ordinary but universal practices, bridging the gap between scientific research and everyday life. Highlighting the limitations, ethical and reflective implications of such an approach, we argue that walking through foodscapes can be seen as a practice for making theory but at the same time political, an epistemic practice that resists reduction of complexity, nurtures spaces of justice and equity, and contributes to a psychology “of and for the world”.