Description: Explores the relationship between craft and war, examining craft fabrication, practices, objects, makers and users in global contexts throughout conflicts since the mid-19th century.
Brief description: Jennifer Way is a scholar and educator in art history at the University of North Texas, USA. Her current research explores craft history and intersections of art with conflict, gender, race, caring, and healing, especially in U.S. and transnational settings from the 19th century to the present. She recently published chapters in Craft in Extremis: Survival and Creativity in Modern War and Genocide c. 1890-1950 (2026); Medical Care, Humanitarianism, and Intimacy in the Long Second World War, 1931-1953 (2025); Fallingwater: Living with and in Art (2025); Modernism, Art, Therapy (2024); and Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges through Art, Architecture, and Design from 1945 (2023).
Review Quotes:
"This volume offers a veritable warren of enticing essays, spanning archival, historical, contemporary, Western, and non-Western perspectives." --Jennifer Salahub, Professor Emerita of Art and Craft Histories, Alberta University of the Arts, Canada
"These essays air out marvelous examples of humanity's dirty laundry by identifying many a 'subversive stitch' (often by a woman) that realized survival and resistance - and also distinct ways that craft has been co-opted into a nationalist symbol. The authors illuminate specific instances when the human penchant for genocide and civil war disrupted indigenous and artisanal knowledge and savor the expansive field of crafted objects as an immense archive of lived experience and emotions." --Ezra Shales, Professor in the History of Art department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, USA