Seher Mirza

This PhD research started with two main questions concerning rural craft communities, mainly women, in Sindh, Pakistan. First, the quality of traditional stitch-craft practice within these communities and second, the quality of empowerment strategies employed thus far.

Textile practice can serve as a medium of communication for qualitative research, exploring aspects of co-design, workshop methods, empowerment strategies and reflective thinking. This in turn helps to understand better the agency of making as part of a relationship between creativity as a method of liberation in rural Pakistan and urban London.

The aim was to explore the qualities of empowerment generated by the co-design encounter between makers as a shared community of young women. The product of the shared encounter between craftswomen is a reciprocal creative agency for each. Through this process a new method of enabling women to use their traditional skills in creative and innovative ways was initiated.

Further, as commitment to the community the research worked with, a parallel social enterprise pilot, S jo was created as an outlet for the creative outcomes of the project and to ensure a steady stream of decent income.