Description
Workshop: Weaving as Colective knowingVanessa Marr with Dr Anna Brown, University of St Andrews
Weaving as collective knowing is an arts-based inquiry into the question of human- nature relations in knowledge making. We join with the conference call to explore modes of scholarship that persist outside of the dominant academic practices of writing, thinking and discussing that encourage a cognitive expression of knowledge. Through the creation of a forest weaving, we invite an engagement with making as a mode of methodological inquiry (Mann 2018) and as a way of knowing (Ingold 2013) that is fleeting, impermanent, and emergent from a felt relation with the world.
The proposed workshop explores our embodied relation to the natural world, in this case the forest, through a weaving together bodies of matter both human and non- human. The process of making-with nature provides a framework for collective embodied reflection on the ways in which we (humans) relate to the natural and social world around us. A single weaving frame constructed from forest materials will become the site of collaborative meaning making where hierarchies can be flattened and hope and aspirations for more desirable future(s) expressed.
Gathering. Participants will be invited to wander in the forest, untethering themselves from their normal patterns of living by ‘attuning to the sensory details of nature’ (Ferns 2025:853). Using wayfaring as a mode of meditating on experiences, hopes and aspirations, participants will gather materials that feel salient to them as they connect with the landscape.
Weaving. Participants will be invited to record their experiences, hopes and aspirations for the future and collectively weave these written fragments together with the materials gathered from the forest. The forest installation will mark a fleeting composition of togetherness.
Dwelling. At the end of the weaving, participants will be invited to critically reflect on the process of making, the impermanence of knowing, how knowledge is made with nature, and how this experience might echo into the future in terms of how knowledge is made, conveyed, amplified and even forgotten in organisation studies and related disciplines.
Reimagining. During the conference, participants are invited to continue to add to the weaving, returning to at will as a quiet space for thinking through the extended process of individual and collective making. In this context it becomes a site for reflection, story making, and response to its evolving form, as temporary fixture that reimagines the connection between nature and self, thought and touch, encounter and emotion.
Dismantling. With a desire to leave no trace, participants will be invited to join in a collective dismantling of the frame to return the materials to the forest. The final stage of the project represents our ability to dismantle and/or reorganise existing knowledge constructs to open new potentials for living.
We envision the weaving as being available throughout the conference for participants to engage with and add to as the event progresses. As such dismantling would happen towards the end of the conference schedule. Alternatively, the workshop can be delivered as a self-contained session that lasts 120 minutes. We are happy to work with conference organisers on the logistical aspects.
Biographies (in alphabetical order)
Anna Brown is a Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews Business School. Before becoming an academic Anna pursued her own creative practice making ceramics. Her research explores embodied skills and inequalities in craft work. She is a creative educator bringing arts-based method into the management classroom.
Vanessa Marr RSA is Principal Lecturer at University of Brighton School of Art and Media. Best known for her award-winning project Domestic Dusters Project which positions the cleaning cloth as an agent for social change, her practice-based research explores methods of craft, drawing, and autoethnography.
Shona Russell is a Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews Business School. Her qualitative research explores accounting, accountability, and governance for sustainability. She is currently exploring the potential of improvised role-play, games and visual methods for education for sustainability in the management classroom.
References
Ferns, G. (2025). For What It’s Earth: Transcending the Human–Nature Dualism Through “Deep Nature Connection”. Business & Society, 64(5), 851-855.
Ingold, T., (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge.
Mann, J. (2018). Knitting the archive: Shetland lace and ecologies of skilled practice. Cultural Geographies, 25(1), 91-106.
| Period | Apr 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Wiltshire, United KingdomShow on map |