ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the people might redress the understudied and under-theorized association of craft and war by focusing on craft therapy used to help rehabilitate troops injured in the World War I. Of particular interest is whether scholarship addresses craft as a social relationship through which healing occurs, and if it offers discussion about the topic and guidance in developing it further to articulate craft therapy’s associations with war. Central to the process were the Reconstruction Aides who delivered craft therapy to injured military as “a relational process” marked by the intra-relational knowledge and “attentiveness”. Photographs documenting craft therapy played an important role in conveying its status as an aesthetics of care because they depicted craft fabrication as a social event attended if not managed by Reconstruction Aides and often they featured more than one convalescing soldier making craft.
