Craft as Pedagogy: De-mythologising the Anthropology Curriculum

For the past 10 years, I have been conducting public crafting workshops targeting different social demographics and employing a range of crafting mediums. Recently, I have brought these workshop structures into the university classroom as a way of highlighting how practice-based methodologies can be added to the anthropology toolkit. Using Camille Nahkid’s (ed) groundbreaking concept of de-mythologising (2023), this paper explores why adding craft to an anthropology curriculum is an important experience for student learning outcomes. Additionally, it will be argued that there is space for us to incorporate craft in new and dynamic ways as a tool for gaining new and innovative forms of knowledges while decolonising anthropology.