Abstract
Although nostalgia is frequently called upon as a reference for skills and aesthetics within many crafts, the tensions within this remain largely unexplored by the social sciences. This paper will focus on skilled work with domestic connotations and explore the potential for such actions to be progressive through their negotiation of nostalgia, taking influence especially from work by Bonnett (Left in the past: radicalism and the politics of nostalgia (p. 208). Continuum, 2010) and Boym (The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2008) and focusing their ideas within a domestic realm that is currently overlooked. These will be explored before looking at the ways in which this is enacted using the case studies of embroidery skills used for the renegotiation of gender. As such, the use of skills, their connotations and embodiment, will be the objects of our focus to argue that acts of transformation are a force by which this nostalgia can be negotiated in order to be moulded to fit with current needs and desires.
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Tedder, V. (2019). Crafting a Progressive Nostalgia: Radical Embroidery as a Negotiation of the Past into a Positive Future. In: Burke, C., Spencer-Wood, S.M. (eds) Crafting in the World. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65088-3_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65088-3_13
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