Much of my work in the MACR program has been looking for overlaps in my own practices as an educator, metalsmith, and environmental steward. My experience teaching at summer camps is where these various roles have been in closest proximity to one another, which made me excited to explore whether they could become one integrated practice. While craft studies has been a generative way to make connections among my own interests and beyond, I have also become interested in how keeping these disciplines distinct creates specific lenses through which to encounter the world. Through my role as an educator, encouraging kids to always ask why, I see the world as questions waiting to be answered; as a metalsmith using many different modes of fabrication, I see the world as things put together; and as an environmental steward committed to the conservation of habitats and ecosystems, I see the world as a web of relationships. Even though each disciplinary lens is distinct, they collectively contribute to how I encounter the world as a whole.

Based on John Freeman-Moir's writing about utopia and liberatory education, it seems that the overlap of disciplinary lenses would give people a fuller, more nuanced perspective of how the world is interconnected, and perhaps therefore grant them more agency in moving through it. For Freeman-Moir, utopia is not a society without flaws, but rather the habit of "acting in terms of seeing the world as whole,"¹which often requires deliberate resistance to cultural norms that prefer to organize skills and identities into tidy, discrete boxes.

Included in this collection are pieces of writing and interviews with people who encounter the world through the lenses of multiple practices:

My interviews with Justin Den Herder, a structural engineer and poet, and Morgan Buckert, a cowboy-boot maker and outdoor educator, explore how looking through multiple lenses at once grants us a more nuanced perspective of the world and the ability to participate in multiple communities of practice. In my conversation with Den Herder, he circles around many ideas about community, trees, and the built environment that all coalesce around notions of connectivity. Buckert discusses how she expresses different facets of herself through her various endeavors. Even though she prefers to keep her practices siloed from one another, the lenses of her individual pursuits contribute to the way she sees the world as a whole.

Botanist and decorated professor Robin Wall Kimmerer's writing overlays an Indigenous and artistic lens to botany, giving her a unique scientific perspective that is not always understood by other practitioners in her field. Choreographer and water + land protector Emily Johnson's essay uses lenses of dance, activism, trauma, and cultural legacy to convey complex thoughts on love. These two pieces of writing help me understand how an integrated perspective of the world can help heal our relationships to land, the communities we belong to, and ourselves.

Separately these works tell the stories of individuals who are trying to balance multiple roles. Together they show a push and pull between increased agency and structural obstacles. These insights and conversations serve as a reminder that I am not the only one who yearns for connectivity and that there are many different ways to work toward an integrated multidisciplinary practice.