BIO

Dr. Hollenbach’s current scholarly research focuses on craft as a “contact zone.” Her historical research studies craft’s so-called “civilizing” role within nineteenth-century Canadian settler colonial society. An important aspect of Dr. Hollenbach’s work on the colonial imperative in western craft is a consideration of the extractive and entitled logic that undergirds the appropriation of non-western cultural objects, materials, and techniques in modern craft without credit or consideration of historical and cultural context.

Another area of Dr. Hollenbach’s current research is a critical race analysis of contemporary amateur crafting cultures, especially “craftivism” (crafty activism), which interrogates the associations between femininity, middle-class social position, and whiteness within domestic crafts, leisure, and lifestyle activism. This research assesses how amateur crafting practices are tied fundamentally to the maker’s sense of self, and how that self is connected to local and global social formations and circumstances.