PhD student Danielle Burke has received a fellowship to help her create a digital map of craftspeople from the Handicraft Movement and invite the people who still have or use those handiworks today to contribute to the site.

Burke, a PhD student in Design Studies at the School of Human Ecology, is a 2026 recipient of the Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. These fellowships support doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences with up to $50,000 including funds for research, training, professional development, and mentorship.

As part of her dissertation work, Burke is taking a rich but undetailed crowd-sourced directory from the 1940s of craftspeople and craft centers in the U.S. and transforming it into a map that connects the people with their locations, networks of support, and examples of their handiwork. The map will become a searchable database of these crafters and home economists, who have often been overlooked because their works are not archived in museums or auction house records.

“Home economists taught a lot of people how to make things and make them with a really different ethos than the more formal art world is interested in,” Burke said. “These folks were interested in making things for practical, everyday use and were interested in building communities by having ‘making’ as an opportunity to get together.”

Burke is a crafter herself, practicing weaving and sewing. She earned her undergraduate degree in fiber arts and has a master’s in folklore. Each of these perspectives becomes salient in her current design studies research. Through her dissertation, she argues that the power of art rests not in its beauty alone, but also in the way it invites people to participate in making. Craft, she says, can promote civic participation.

“If we [can] get neighbors to sit next to each other for the excuse of making a rag rug — not for the excuse of having political dialogue, but just to sit with each other and use your hands — it just means that connections get made between them, and hopefully that would mend some of the divisive tones that we have for each other,” Burke said.

She hopes the map will be a starting point for people to think about how and why craft matters, and why it’s important to get to know your neighbors.

The craft practices outlined in Burke’s map include things like weaving, papier-mâché, instrument-making, beadwork, woodcarving, and fly tying. For example, community  groups that built and operated their own kilns sprang up around the time of the Great Depression and they started making their own pottery, likely when they couldn’t otherwise afford it.

The main challenge in studying this list of craftspeople is a dearth of information in the list itself; it often includes someone’s name, location, and perhaps a few words about what they make, but there are no pictures. Burke hopes that having a public website with this information will allow and encourage people who have something made by one of these craftspeople to contribute to the project. It can also help give her scholarly work more personal meaning.

“If someone feels like their grandmother’s neighbor who they still have pottery from is being celebrated in this larger way, that might feel really nice to enable that experience to happen for someone else,” Burke said.

On campus, Burke has found support and scholarly connections at the Center for Culture, History, and the Environment (CHE) and the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture. She works with her advisors, Sarah Carter and Marina Moskowitz, to undertake this interdisciplinary research. The UW Cartography Lab has been an essential resource for conceptualizing the map and, with funds from the Mellon/ACLS Fellowship, will help Burke to build the interactive map and website.

“This particular fellowship was really important for me,” Burke said. “I feel really lucky to receive it, because it has so much more support for building out this kind of atypical research tool.”

Burke noted that this is her second time applying for the Dissertation Innovation Fellowship and that she requested feedback from reviewers at Mellon and ACLS after they did not award her first proposal. She would tell other students pursuing the fellowship to try again. “It really helped to apply a second time,” she said.