What happens when technologies that promise care and insight become extractive systems that commodify our intimate data and perpetuate surveillance on female bodies?  ‘Thinking of cycles more like gardens less like mines’ investigates the political economy of menstrual tracking technologies, exploring how craft-based methods of cycle tracking can embrace imperfection, subjectivity and ritual meaning, rather than efficiency or predictivity. 

When reproductive rights are facing resurgent challenges, alternative tracking methods gain political significance. Crochet can’t be reproduced by machines, making the crochet calendar an opportunity to question dominant technological paradigms and imagine epistemic alternatives grounded in care and relational knowledge. 

By reimagining how we document cycles, this project invites a shift: from extraction to cultivation, from control to connection.