This chapter was published in Encountering Craft (2023), edited by Chandan Bose and Mira Mohsini, published by Taylor and Francis.
Abstract
Presently, it’s difficult to envision how to do research, let alone conduct it. A few days after I type this introduction, the city in which I now live, Melbourne, will have gained the unenviable status of having spent the longest days in lockdown – 246 days, with more to go before restrictions are lifted – of any city in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. 1 Commentators compare long lockdowns like Melbourne’s to a marathon, and describe the psychological strategies that marathon runners use to push past ‘the wall’ in the last kilometers. 2 During the pandemic, I have quit secure, stable employment. I have been unemployed and spent my savings compensating for income no longer coming in. I have taken a new job, not knowing, thanks to COVID-19 travel restrictions, when I would actually be able to start. I have moved continents. I have lived in an empty flat for months, sleeping on a borrowed camping mattress and pretending it was all an exciting adventure for the sake of my daughter. I have done all of this during lockdowns. After 18 months running sprint after sprint towards an unknown, indefinable and always shifting finish line, carrying a child on one shoulder, a marriage on the other, work commitments and expectations on my back, ageing parents on another continent in my heart and myself, buried somewhere in my gut, I am exhausted, and have nothing more to give. In this context, the idea of having the capacity to reimagine research seems laughable at best, and a hurtful taunt at worst.
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Please use this reference when citing this work:
Teasley, S., (2023). On crafting history in a time without craftiness. In Bose, C., & Mohsini, M. (Eds.), Encountering Craft (1st ed., Vol. 1, pp. 46–57). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003026136-3