Kirsty Robertson is an ABD Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art at Queen’s University, in Ontario, Canada. She currently lives in Montreal, Québec, with her partner, two cats and a dog, and intersperses working on her dissertation with a variety of performative/activist actions, a radio show and knitting. Kirsty’s dissertation is centered on the intersections of global justice protest and visual culture, in particular embodied artistic responses, new media, and new technologies of communication. Her work is widely published, both in academic journals and books, but also in freely distributed zines, internet articles and blogs. Recently, the process of writing her dissertation has lead to the branching out of her interests in a number of directions, particularly with regard to new literacies and the potential for different forms of authorship and readership, and investigating the spaces for activism in wearable technologies and immersive digital environments. Walking through the streets of Montreal with her dog, if asked, Kirsty will often admit to wondering how a dissertation would look if knitted rather than written.

How to Knit an Academic Paper

This paper began as an idea, drawn from a painting by a member of Winnipeg’s Royal Art Lodge – a girl, sitting on a stool, hands folded, her thoughts leaving her head as a spider’s web. Written at the top: waiting for a reason to do anything. What would it look like to think this way? Could a paper work as a web-like structure? How would one knit a paper? In half humour and half seriousness, “How to Knit An Academic Paper” became exactly that, an exercise in connections, an attempt to knit a stitch, pick it up in the next thought, and leave it until the next line when it would be picked up again to form a garment/an argument. My reasons were vague and heady – a way to understand a diffuse control through writing, a way of instilling hypertext into a traditional document, a way, in part, of embracing both what is ordered and what is potential in textile construction. In other words, a way to think through the idea of the text/ile. Containing within it the interactive element of the knitting pattern, it is a web within a web – the pattern reveals its inspiration, and the paper comes full circle.