> [!NOTE]+ Meta > Author:: [[Trevor Marchand]] > Reference:: https://biccs.dh.gu.se/ > Date:: 2025 > Tags:: #warp > WeftLinks:: [[Psychological value of craft]] > Claim:: [[Claim - Working with materials helps us appreciate the needs of other people]] > [!SUMMARY] Summary > Craftwork is presented as a vital bridge that reunites intellectual "mindwork" with physical experience, offering a unique way to understand mathematics as a tangible, embodied, and emotionally intelligent practice that nurtures the whole person. ### Highlights > Mathematics underpins much of what we do as humans but remains largely outside our conscious awareness. Moreover, mathematics as a doing is unvalued because ‘doing maths’ has been conventionally attributed to the ‘rational mind’, not the body. Creative practices nevertheless display an unparalleled richness of embodied mathematizing. Grounded in anthropological fieldwork with masons, woodworkers, artists and dancers around the world, my lecture commences with an exploration of the diverse and complex ways that these practitioners and performers spatialise, appraise shapes and forms, assess geometries, calculate, quantify, weigh and take measure while in the flow of their tasks. I also consider the roles that the tool-in-hand, the materials being worked, and the physical and social contexts of activities play in forming and transforming mathematising gestures, sensorial engagement and problem-solving strategies. Embodied mathematising is situated, often collaborative, and entails human-to-non-human encounters and interactions. > > But why is the exploration of embodied mathematizing in creative practices important? My research aims are not to contribute merely to a deeper understanding about what maths is, but also to a radical rethinking about the ways that it is taught, learned, practiced and lived as an activity. In short, it is to return mathematics to the body, and the body to the general curriculum of learning. My lecture will therefore conclude with deliberations on why the creative practices and problem-solving activities of craftwork, in particular, must be embedded in the ‘mindwork’ of classroom subjects. Craftwork, I argue, holds unique potential for reinvigorating our direct, tangible relations with the material world and for uniting conceptual thinking with bodily and emotional kinds of intelligence, thereby nurturing the whole person.