Catherine CroninDec 1

beautiful by @RebeccaSolnit: “The fabric of this country is forever being torn apart by hate and exclusion; it is forever being stitched into new patterns, new connections, new relationships … a quilter's art of bringing the fragments together into a whole.”

thinking of @francesbell, the creators of the #FemEdTechQuilt and the #AIDSQuilt, Rosa Parks, and all who carefully stitch together resistance & hope in so many ways.

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/solidarity-stitches-us-together-today-world-aids-day-is-also-the-70th-anniversary-of-rosa-parks-historic-protest/

Solidarity Stitches Us Together: Today, World AIDS Day, Is Also the 70th Anniversary of Rosa Parks's Historic Protest

I saw two radically different versions of what a quilt could be yesterday and yet they spoke to the same issues. I caught the show Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California at the Berkeley Art Museum Sunday afternoon. I love quilts and while I could love them purely

Meditations in an Emergency
Show threadKate BowlesDec 1

@catherinecronin @RebeccaSolnit @francesbell Reading this today already brought you, Frances and @Ammienoot to my mind Catherine, and here you are. Hello!

Stitching together resistance and hope indeed.

Show threadCatherine Cronin
@kate and there you all are! I needed this today — expansive thinking about making change, and connecting with you all 💛
@RebeccaSolnit @francesbell @Ammienoot
Dec 1 at 8:30pmWeb
Show threadKate BowlesDec 1
@catherinecronin @RebeccaSolnit @francesbell @Ammienoot I needed this today too. Change through connectedness.
Show threadFrances BellDec 1
@kate @Ammienoot @catherinecronin @RebeccaSolnit I certainly think that the #femedtechquilt was about intended change through connectedness But from my own more recent experience of the immediate therapeutic value of the act of making, stitching, quilting, it makes me think about how the value of making squares for the #femedtechquilt delivered connectedness retrospectively during COVID19 when our need for connection was so great.
Show threadKate BowlesDec 1
@francesbell @Ammienoot @catherinecronin @RebeccaSolnit Reflecting on this Frances (and loving that it’s summoned you too), I’m seeing more about how connectedness in the everyday sense of putting things together builds capacity for radical and intentional connectedness: what if we now can put things together differently?
Show threadFrances BellDec 1
@kate @Ammienoot @catherinecronin @RebeccaSolnit I am not going to explain this very well but it makes me think of earlier work by Watson-Mannheim et al on Virtual Work eg https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2575.2011.00371.x where a perceived discontinuity such as geographical distance can be addressed by a continuity of digital connection . So these are not fixed in either category but made malleable through our human endeavours and perceptions.
Show threadmags amondDec 1
@francesbell @kate @Ammienoot @catherinecronin @RebeccaSolnit
"a quilter's art" ... a new way to think about the good that digital connection can do in overcoming geographical disconnection - Catherine your prompt has pieced some fragments into this digital thread. I'm thankful to have you all wrapped around me today.
Show threadKate BowlesDec 2
@magsamond @francesbell @Ammienoot @catherinecronin @RebeccaSolnit The other aspect of this wrapping is temporal disconnection — how timezones ask us to wait patiently for each other in a world driven by the ideal of the instant response. The quilting of time feels like something that holds us over years as well as all our nows.
Show threadmags amondDec 2
@kate @francesbell @Ammienoot @catherinecronin @RebeccaSolnit now that is a good thought, Kate
Show threadFrances BellDec 2
@Ammienoot @catherinecronin @kate @magsamond and this ties in with Jasmine Ulmer’s work on slow ontology for scholars, quilters and the world. I am really getting the hang of the slow and my stitching practice really helps with that and my wellbeing.
Show threadKate BowlesDec 2

@francesbell @Ammienoot @catherinecronin @magsamond Jasmine Ulmer is new to me Frances, and I’ve found a PDF online that I’m sinking into. Thank you. It’s so painful now to read against the torrent of faster! more! that AI has brought to our thinking.

“Writing used to be a more time-intensive, material process. It was slow not as an intentional statement on the quality of life but as a matter of the time needed for production. Early writers used material surfaces to compose; the natural envi-ronment was very much a part of the writing process. Writers used surfaces such as stone, parchment, vellum, and papyrus to etch writing and inscribe print; surfaces were not to be wasted, and neither were the rare inks, silver, and gold that marked illuminated manuscripts.”

Thinking now about writing as time not to be wasted, and a sudden memory of crinkly onion skin airletter writing paper.