Weaving as knowledge, knowledge as weaving: feminist reflections on the agency of materialities

In this article I seek to understand and problematize the metaphor of knowledge as weaving, as a way to critically understand mediations, inequalities and differences in the production of techno-scientific knowledge, and its encounters and dialogues with other knowledges. The starting point of the analysis derives from the ethnographic component of an interdisciplinary project, oriented towards the design of a tangible user interface inspired by calado, a handmade embroidery done in the region of Cartago, Colombia. Considering the way this embroidery is performed, it can be understood as a form of weaving. The meeting between the knowing-doing of artisan embroiderers, a knowledge situated in their hands, feminized and precarious, and the knowledge of engineering, with its coded and legitimated expertise, simultaneously entangles and disestangles practices that support hierarchies and epistemic and gender binaries, embedded in particular geopolitical contexts. However, they also allow creativity, repair and reinvention of these embodied orders, their temporalities and daily realizations. To develop the argument I start by discussing how the proposed approach dislodges a classic metaphor in the social studies of science: that socio-technical systems are seamless webs. Then I give an account of the ways in which a particular ethnographic approach to embroidery allows us to reveal specific forms of knowledge which question the place that technological and scientific knowledge has, particularly when it encounters other forms of knowledge. To develop this argument I propose two complementary movements. First a “zoom-out” to the work of the embroiderers, providing a broader view of the labor that supports the existence of weaving and its vulnerable conditions. Then a “zoom-in” onto this embroidery technique, approaching its materiality to see from there the structures that also support it. My intention with these movements, is to deploy the questions that emerge from the ethnography to critique the place of techno-scientific knowledge, embodied in this case in engineering, when it encounters other knowledge types