Crafting Resilience: Cultural Heritage and Community Engagement in Post-Industrial Textile Communities

The aim of this fellowship is to develop and share key findings from my doctoral research with academic, public and practitioner stakeholders. Crafting Resilience: Cultural Heritage and community engagement in post-industrial textile communities is based in areas for former intensive industrial textile production in Bradford, W.Yorks and Church, E.Lancs places that now experience generational unemployment and pronounced health inequalities. Additional impacts of austerity and the pandemic have exacerbated existing inequalities. The research, based in long term community based creative heritage projects explores how engagements with cultural heritage through slow, localised craft practices can construct and articulate collective identity and build resilience. The projects worked with specific aspects of textile heritage: printing and dyeing, and recycling and repair practices. I am a practitioner-researcher with many years of practice based in the development and delivery of socially engaged arts projects. Multiple methods were employed over a period of years including participant observation during textile making and gardening workshops, semi-structured interviews with individuals and groups, photography and a reflective daily stitching practice.
My key findings are:
1. Arts and heritage projects need time to craft resilience. I evidence that time in community-based projects offers opportunities for trust, confidence building, skill development and truly co-produced work. I will interrogate why and how this happens through my publications and public engagement work and its significance for practice, academic debate and policy.
2. Arts-led inquiries offer new and powerful directions for community heritage. How does arts-led inquiry do this and why is it significant? Layers of heritage were explored partly through engagement with the materials of the former industry and creative practices around them. These offer a way in to wider conversations and connections to heritage. My planned work sets up new conversations with Belgian Universities and community heritage organisations plus public engagement work in the UK will consolidate this work.
3. Community-based spaces are also spaces of care. The community organisations I worked with during my
research provide places for people to come together but also are places where people can build resilience. In what way does arts-based engagement make a difference in these settings? The geographies of community spaces will be examined through an article and conference paper and the development of a new funding application to extend this work.
4. Exploring textile heritage connects post-industrial spaces and senses of place. These hyperlocal projects developed opportunities to discuss and explore global stories. What is the significance of participants sharing senses of place in these contexts? The symposium planned within the fellowship offers project participants, commissioners and policy makers opportunities to share experiences and outcomes of socially engaged practice.
5. Socially engaged arts practitioners experience precarity on many levels. The patchwork of resources often required to deliver long-term projects has an impact on their sustainability and the resilience of practitioners. How can these insights make a difference to practitioners and policy makers? An editor- invited article for Textile: Cloth and Culture will share these insights through my use of an ongoing creative method.
This fellowship will share my work with academic audiences through writing 3 journal articles and 2 conference papers. I will also deliver public engagement activities: online sessions for a wider audience, a symposium delivered with Bradford 2025 City of Culture (as a runway event in 2024), a lecture and workshop for academics and heritage professionals in Belgium. I will apply for funding to develop a new small project related to textiles, their manufacture and community responses.