aau/MüllerSocial scientist Fredy Mora Gámez will join the University of Klagenfurt in October 2026 to launch his ERC Consolidator Grant project, “Handcrafted coalitions: Tantear through digital mapping beyond borders”. HANDigiCRAFT explores the social relationships and forms of knowledge that emerge around objects handcrafted by people on the move. Combining ethnography, collaborative crafting and digital mapping, it investigates how these objects connect people and create possibilities for solidarity across borders. The project brings science and technology studies into conversation with critical migration studies and feminist and decolonial scholarship.
How did you come to focus on handcrafted objects made by people on the move?
I am a social scientist, and for many years I have been interested in the technologies used at borders and in border control. I wanted to understand how people experience technologies such as surveillance cameras, digitally recorded fingerprints, records and registration systems when crossing borders, and the forms of bureaucracy they encounter in the process. Through this work, I learned a great deal about their stories. I noticed that many people make things with their hands, often using whatever materials happen to be available. They do this for many different reasons: sometimes to earn a little money, sometimes to share memories. People told me remarkable stories of solidarity, memory and efforts to make the best of precarious circumstances. I found this fascinating. That is how the idea emerged for a project focusing on these objects and the stories behind them.
Do these people often make traditional handicrafts that they learned from their families in their home countries, or does that not play a role?
That is an important question, not only conceptually, but also culturally and politically. There are many examples in which tradition is combined with whatever materials are available. The project also gives interdisciplinary social science an opportunity to rethink how we understand tradition and how we value the knowledge embedded in handicrafts. What people do is not simply a skill practised by their ancestors; it also tells us a great deal about survival, improvisation, solidarity and community-building. These objects embody knowledge that is shared among people who become part of these communities. Those with more experience help newcomers and sometimes teach them these handicraft practices. What I find particularly compelling is that this kind of knowledge cannot be lost simply by crossing a border.
How does crossing borders affect the recognition of different forms of knowledge?
When people cross borders, their qualifications for instance may no longer be recognised, and their languages and experience may be undervalued. The knowledge itself does not disappear, but the conditions under which it is recognised and put into practice change. Handcrafting offers one way for people to use, share and develop their knowledge, even when formal institutions fail to recognise it.
What usually happens to these objects?
Very often, they change hands. Sometimes they are sold, and sometimes they are passed on. I am also interested in how the people who acquire or receive these handicrafts engage with them. What do they make of them? How do they understand the stories behind these objects, and how do they relate to them? I therefore want to use digital methods to trace how these objects move, but also how people interact with them. In other words, I want to document the social life of objects handcrafted by people on the move.
Can you give an example?
In Colombia, I met a woman who made small dolls, partly from recycled materials, that were intended to serve as so-called worry dolls (matapesares). With the little money she earned from selling them, she was able to buy some food for her family while she waited for her official registration to be processed. This was deeply moving in many ways. Now imagine that other people on the move, perhaps travelling for entirely different reasons, meet this woman, buy one of her worry dolls and take it with them. The object itself then begins to move. One of our methodological strategies to know more about these objects consists of attaching QR codes to them. These codes link to a website where their new owners can record where the objects go, how they are used and what they mean to them. QR codes would link participating objects to a platform where people can choose to share accounts of their journeys, uses and meanings. These contributions would help us explore the relationships that develop around the objects. In this way, we can trace some of the social life of these objects.
How do these two elements come together for you: physical handicrafts and the relatively new possibilities offered by digital technologies?
In our society, we often think of the material and the digital as clearly separate. This project gives us an opportunity to break down that boundary, or at least to make it less distinct. The idea of tracing the movements of these objects in this way emerged through discussions with people on the move. In a sense, this allows us to weave the digital into the objects themselves. The platform will provide more information about each handcrafted object, including the story of the person who made it. It will also allow people to leave comments, send questions to the maker, and share places, photos and videos showing where they have placed the object in their home, where it is going or whom they intend to give it to. Participation will be voluntary, and participants will decide what they wish to share and whether they wish to be identified. I want to explore the kinds of relationships or alliances that emerge through these engagements with the objects through the concept of “handcrafted coalitions”.
By “handcrafted coalitions”, I mean the relationships that take shape around making, exchanging and engaging with these objects. These may connect makers, recipients, researchers and solidarity organisations, creating possibilities for sharing knowledge and acting together across borders. This opens possibiloities also to think of migration and mobility in different terms and narratives that are not always tied to borders.
Where will you begin geographically in the project? Where will you find people on the move who make handicrafts?
As a first step, I want to return to places that I already know well and where I have worked before: Greece, Spain and Colombia. We have selected cities and locations through which many people pass, not only as places where they arrive, but also as places from which they continue their journeys. They are intermediate points along complex migration routes. We have also chosen places that attract large numbers of tourists. This allows us to examine interactions between people who are on the move for very different reasons. These are starting points, and additional cases may emerge through the research team’s work and collaborations. At a later stage, I can also imagine including additional locations that are relevant to the Alps-Adriatic region, at the centre of which the University of Klagenfurt is situated.
Finally, a question about the project title: what does tantear mean?
Tantear is a Spanish verb that can mean to feel one’s way, to explore by touch, or to find one’s way without having complete knowledge of what lies ahead. I draw on the work of María Lugones and use the concept to think about forms of inquiry that are experimental, situated, embodied and open-ended. In HANDigiCRAFT, we develop this as “collectively knowing through the hands”: exploring what we can learn together through making, handling and engaging with objects. It connects ethnographic research and digital mapping with collaborative, creative ways of producing knowledge.
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About the person
Fredy Mora Gámez will join the Department of Society, Knowledge and Politics at the University of Klagenfurt on 1 October 2026 with his ERC Consolidator Grant project “Handcrafted coalitions: Tantear through digital mapping beyond borders – HANDigiCRAFT”, for which he is Principal Investigator. Since 2021, he has worked as a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Vienna, having previously been an Associate Professor at Linköping University in Sweden. Fredy Mora Gámez completed a Master’s degree in Science and Technology Studies at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and a doctorate at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom with a dissertation entitled “Reparation Beyond Statehood: Assembling Rights Restitution in Post-conflict Colombia”. His earlier research examined migration, borders, algorithms, data and infrastructures, as well as technologies of memory and reparation. He has studied how technological systems and forms of classification make people and populations visible or invisible, how algorithms participate in migration governance, and how databases and official records shape the recognition of victims and the possibilities of reparation.
Der Beitrag The Social Life of Things: Handicrafts Made by People on the Move erschien zuerst auf University of Klagenfurt.