Piecework: Ethnographies of Place

Piecework is a lively collection of intergenerational essays on how people create possibility and place through the arts, culture, and heritage. Women and children play central roles in these ethnographies and autoethnographies. Their stories and struggles, ideas and breakthroughs, affirm the exponential power of families, schools, and communities to shape their own destinies through creative action. We learn that change is a collective endeavor, shaped on the ground, with the people we know and the communities we cherish.

The book is structured into three themes: classrooms, communities, and migrations. The essays on schooling include hard-to-find ethnographies from artivist classrooms serving children and teens. We first meet the author as a somatic child, then witness her as a mother collaborating with children and adults through innovative arts education projects. Classrooms become spaces for critical thinking and joyful contestation using design, dance, music, or poetry. Public schools mobilize faculty and leverage local resources to bring theater, costume, design, and painting within reach. Multiple settings and scenarios reveal how the arts can be integrated into studying almost anything, while inviting young people to be seen and heard while thinking imaginatively and empathetically. The essays about community focus on youth activists, adult leaders, and path breaking women ancestors. Teens alchemize pain into power as storytellers and advocates. Curators and artists rewrite history to honor a musical matriarch. Community arts leaders gather across neighborhoods to share strategies for spatial justice in the context of gentrification. The essays on migration take a historical turn as the author digs into ancestral archives for clues about her family’s activism, migration stories, and refugee experiences. She unearth’s stories of community organizing, art making, and resilience. The book includes provocative interviews about writing, freedom, and women’s authorship with cultural promoters in Nigeria and Brazil. Piecework concludes with a pep talk for future culture makers.