Humanitarian Handicrafts: Testing the relationship between archival history and hands-on craft making

This paper asks how craft practice can inform historical reconsiderations of handicraft produced within a humanitarian socio-economic framework (to support humanitarian aims or fund-raising initiatives), and in turn explores how historical processes become materialised in contemporary humanitarian craftwork. By considering the possibilities for practice-based methods, this paper proposes the utility of involvement in craft-making processes for historians of humanitarianism. At the same time, this gives rise to a multiplicity of concerns for a contemporary craft practitioner undertaking a form of creative expression identifiable by its humanitarian purpose. It is therefore a helpful corrective to the temptation to think that experiments are innovations. Looking at early attempts in history we see a practice mirrored, not in the results, but in the process of working in a humanitarian mode of craft-based practice.