Reconciliation Through Digital Textiles

This chapter provides a critical reflection on the geopolitics of knowledge mobilisation within an interdisciplinary research project called Mending the New – Reconciliation through digital textiles, which was carried out by a consortium of researchers from Colombia and the United Kingdom working together with four women’s textiles collectives located in different rural areas of Colombia (Bojayá, Quibdó, Mampuján, and Sonsón). This project aimed to generate meeting points and connections between these collectives to understand their use of textiles as a language of memory and care of life during wartime. Through the research, the team used Participatory Design (PD) methods to explore this collective and material mode of documenting and narrating the conflict through textile making and introduced digital technologies as a strategy for engaging the participants in unusual material dialogues; this, in turn, triggered challenging conversations about war and reconciliation from new perspectives. This case presents rich information on the role of Participatory Design in reconciliation, peace, and armed conflict contexts; however, constituting the focus of this chapter, the specific setting of this project shaped and sustained research design work in such a way that geopolitics of knowledge practices considerably marked participation. Awareness of the politics of knowledge production and mobilisation within Global North–Global South research collaborations brings a set of critical challenges that, while not necessarily new to Participatory Design, reconfigure what counts as participation, who participates, and how.