Textile Craft as Empowerment: Shared Research and Craft Activities around Textiles in Museums

With a focus on museums, this article illustrates how textile crafts can become a source for scholarly inquiry and can enhance the agendas of cultural and environmental sustainability.
The empirical data comprises four research projects conducted since 2017 focusing on textile craft and creativity with women of refugee, migrant or second-generation migrant background, as well as with Danes. Through these cases, we unravel the potential of textile crafts as a venue and encounter for museums in a societal context, both as a professional outlook, in education, a cultural heritage, an object of research, and a pastime for pleasure and sociality. The common thread - our academic quest – is how, when, and why textile craft is entangled with female empowerment, and how textile craft as an embedded community action can empower and most importantly: represent an opportunity for museums to reach new audiences and use the museum space in new ways.