The Medium Is the Message: Textile Arts as a Site of Knowledge Subversion and Political Visibility

In "The Medium Is the Message," Marshall McLuhan argues that media and technology shape society through "a huge collective surgery on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics" (1964, p. 12), reflecting technological determinism. As such, this presentation argues that methodologies function as media, shaping what can be known. Textile arts, as alternative media, reshape what counts as knowledge, reflecting cultural studies' aim to adopt, adapt, and respond to uncertainty. Specifically, quilting foregrounds the seams of knowledge, challenging the seamlessness of dominant knowledge forms. Given AI's proliferation, Quilting as Methodology (Arellano, 2022) offers an alternative medium of knowledge production that foregrounds materiality through slow, physical acts of construction and repair, while prompting a critical re-evaluation of the contemporary academic landscape