June 1, 2026
UC Santa Barbara art historian Alida Jekabson co-edits a forthcoming Bloomsbury anthology examining craft as a form of memory, resistance, rehabilitation and survival during war.
In the aftermath of World War II, inside a displaced persons camp in the British Zone of occupied Germany, Alida Jekabson’s paternal grandmother worked as a scout leader, teaching young people craft practices and survival skills.
Decades later, Jekabson found herself studying the material traces of that world, including national dress pattern books sent to her family from the Soviet Union and clippings about Latvian American communities continuing those traditions after resettlement.
For Alida R. Jekabson, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at UC Santa Barbara, these materials became more than family records. They became historical evidence.