Weaving communities of practice. Textiles, culture and identity in the Andes: a semiotic and ontological approach.

Research in Bolivia, Peru and Chile,
combined with museum research there and in the UK, focuses on Bolivia,
Peru, and Chile on the basis of previous ethnographic, archaeological
and museological knowledge and contacts, and three time horizons:
Tiwanaku, the Inka-early colony, and the contemporary. The primary aims
of this project are: to link visual, computer and museum studies in
areas of cognition, and curatorial methods; to advance textile studies
in areas of structure mapping and correlations with socio-cultural data;
to advance understanding of meta-learning in visual contexts; to ensure
that, through exchanges of ideas, methods, and technologies, the study
of the visual aspects of man-machine interface methodologies are better
integrated with the social sciences. Secondary aims include providing
new methods for textile producers to document and defend their textile
patrimony and understanding regional textual practices from the
perspective of Andean weavers contributes to decolonisation studies, and
new intercultural ontological approaches.