In the early years Spare Rib magazine used craft to construct womanhood through agentic, creative choices in handmade production.
Alison Mayne
Alison Mayne is a researcher in handcraft, wellbeing, digital crafting communities and everyday textiles. Her PhD explored the different ways that amateur making in knit and crochet—crafted alone and shared on Facebook—could have implications for subjective perceptions of wellbeing. She has also spoken and written on representation of knit on Instagram, remaking historical C20th clothing, fashion in Spare Rib magazine and her own amateur textile practice. Her current work is focused on historic Scottish wool production and the textile archive of Miss Hope MacDougall at Dunollie Museum, Argyll.
You can follow Alison on Twitter: @knittyphd
WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey