T. Pérez-Bustos, L. Suchman, A. Chocontá-Piraquive

conversations

The conveners of this Conversation are all engaged in work at the intersections of feminist anthropology and design, and collaborators on the project Mending the New. The project aims to develop a framework for reconciliation with communities that have been crafting textiles and have been severely affected by armed conflict in Colombia. The project works with communities that, through textile making, commit themselves to memory and reconciliation in the municipalities of Bojayá and Quibdó – both in Chocó – María La Baja in the region Montes de María, Sonsón in the Oriente Antioqueño region, Carmen de Bolivar, in the department of Bolivar, Turbo in Antioquia and the Guaméz Valley in Putumayo. As well as documenting memories of war, textile crafting generates spaces of common reflection and has a healing, restorative and constructive potential that negotiates memory and reconciliation.

Tania Perez-Bustos is an Associate Professor, anthropologist and Doctor of Education. She has served as advisor to the Societies for Social Studies of Science, 4s and ESOCITE, and as editor of the Journals Humanistic Universities (2011-2015) and Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society (since 2017). Her research stirs around knowledge dialogues and knowledge creation practices that interrelate techno-scientific knowledge with popular knowledge of different kinds. She is also interested in processes and practices of knowledge feminization. Currently, she researches several handcraft textile making practices, understanding them as knowledge and care technologies.

Alexandra Chocontá Piraquive is a Colombian researcher and feminist ethnographer. She has a bachelor's degree in anthropology and a master's in gender studies. She has been researching the social, cultural, and political meaning of contemporary textile practices and craftivism since 2016. She is also exploring how neoliberalism and white feminism is impacting the lives of vulnerable women in Colombia, shaping hegemonic ideas around gender, youth, and sexuality . Currently, she is a Ph.D. student and a Teaching Assistant at the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota.  

Lucy Suchman is Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology at Lancaster University in the UK. Her research works at the intersections of anthropology and the field of feminist science and technology studies, focused on cultural imaginaries and material practices of technology design. She served as Program Chair for the Second Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in 1988, and for the first Conference on Participatory Design of Computer Systems in 1990. She was a founding member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and served on its Board of Directors from 1982-1990. In 2010 she received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award. She was President of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) from 2016 to 2017.