I’mOther

I’mOther explores the concept of childfreeness, and the notion of being childfree by choice as a cis-woman, through multidisciplinary practices and theories that combine methods from art and crafts, metadesign and feminist sociology. The project is situated in Swedish context through an autoethnographic-inspired orientation that brings in situated knowledge and in addition aims to invite and acknowledge diverse experiences and insights from creative and influential collaborations, in order to weave together a bigger picture. To uncover the elements that uphold the hegemonic fertility norm, and look into what a deviation from this norm means in an everyday context, the project seeks to move between individual and sociocultural levels through a norm-critical and norm-creative design approach.

Through a process of unpicking, going from norm, to language, to sentence, to word, the project has engaged in different levels of languaging with the ambition to intervene at a paradigm level and open up for conceptual spaces when thinking and talking about what adulthood can include. In a collaborative probing of spaces, which can invite conversations about childfreeness, crafts have acted as a means of social interplay. Engaging with the crafshership of embroidery in combination with the comics medium the project further elaborates through an artistic interpretation to convey narratives of childfree women. In a celebratory way, the project wants to give agency to women who experience life outside of the norm and speak to those who have the privilege to shape their own lives and to those who want to understand the choice of others.