Donna Haraway is our "Friend": Reconfiguring Friendship Bracelets and Bibliography

This project uses the friendship bracelet as a way to "re-weave" the academic canon. Friendship bracelets are handmade macramé bracelets of embroidery thread, intended to be worn as a sign of lasting friendship. In this collaboration with Julia Pollack (MS '12), bracelets have been woven with bibliographical references to important work of women in the field of knowledge-production.

The bracelets, with their citations in the author-date format of the Chicago Manual of Style, index scholarship by women across the disciplines about the making of knowledge, as well as the invisible practice of librarianship that is often undertaken by women. Weaving bibliographical references into friendship bracelets offers a novel way to foreground and consider the labor that underpins knowledge and its infrastructures, as well as to share such work in unconventional venues outside the academy. In this act of radical bibliography, research by women will be brought into contact with audiences in other spaces, thus broadening and amplifying its impact.