Making as Method: Weaving Together Natural Beauty, Thought and a Sense of Belonging to the Land through Wild Basketry

Dr. Leighton used Buttedahl and Skene Learning and Teaching Innovation Funds to study wild basketry in order to brings a hands-on arts-and nature-based approach to knowledge.

An antidote to more anesthetic approaches within traditional research methods, this inquiry will explore what happens when we go to the woods, are open to complex and rich relationships within the land, and are willing to be taught by the world (not just learn facts about it), and take up the aesthetic of thinking by making. A sustainable harvest of plants, shaped and woven at the intersection of thought, beauty, place and person, manifest knowledge – both metaphorically and materially, through the ancient, traditional art of basketry as method. This study proposes a more holographic and decolonizing research episteme – where body, mind, and spirit can flourish when natural and social science find common ground when we make to know.