Craft Economies provides a wide-ranging exploration of contemporary craft production, situating practices of amateur and professional making within a wider creative economy. Contributors address a ...diverse range of practices, sites and forms of making in a wide range of regional and national contexts, from floristry to ceramics and from crochet to coding. The volume considers the role of digital practices of making and the impact of the maker's movement as part of larger trends around customisation, on-demand production, and the possibilities of 3D printing and digital manufacturing.
Contemporary craft, art and design are inseparable from the flows of production and consumption under global capitalism. The New Politics of the Handmade features twenty-three voices who critically ...rethink the handmade in this dramatically shifting economy. The authors examine craft within the conditions of extreme material and economic disparity; a renewed focus on labour and materiality in contemporary art and museums; the political dimensions of craftivism, neoliberalism, and state power; efforts toward urban renewal and sustainability; the use of digital technologies; and craft's connections to race, cultural identity and sovereignty in texts that criss-cross five continents. They claim contemporary craft as a dynamic critical position for understanding the most immediate political and aesthetic issues of our time.
Throughout the 21st century, various craft practices have drawn the attention of academics and the general public in the West. In Craft is Political, D Wood has gathered a collection of essays to ...argue that this attention is a direct response to and critique of the particular economic, social and technological contexts in which we live. Just as Ruskin and Morris viewed craft and its ethos in the 1800s as a kind of political opposition to the Industrial Revolution, Wood and her authors contend that current craft activities are politically saturated when perspectives from the Global South, Indigenous ideology and even Western government policy are examined. Craft is Political argues that a holistic perspective on craft, in light of colonialism, post-colonialism, critical race theory and globalisation, is overdue. A great diversity of case studies is included, from craft and design in Turkey and craft markets in New Zealand to Indigenous practitioners in Taiwan and Finnish craft education. Craft is Political brings together authors from a variety of disciplines and nations to consider politicised craft.
This book examines individuals, families and communities of craftworkers and their changing experience in town and country. Based on case studies drawn from personal, business, institutional and ...official records, as well as newspaper reports and visual illustrations, it looks at workplace dynamics and handmade wares shaped by personal consumption, rather than industrial production. Stana Nenadic examines the ‘things’ that were made and the values they embodied at a time when most Scots were still engaged in hand making – either for income or pleasure – despite Scotland’s emergence as a great industrial powerhouse.
Politically adrift, alienated from Weimar society, and fearful of competition from industrial elites and the working class alike, the independent artisans of interwar Germany were a particularly ...receptive audience for National Socialist ideology. As Hitler consolidated power, they emerged as an important Nazi constituency, drawn by the party's rejection of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Yet, in the years after 1945, the artisan class became one of the pillars of postwar stability, thoroughly integrated into German society.From Craftsmen to Capitalists gives the first account of this astonishing transformation, exploring how skilled tradesmen recast their historical traditions and forged alliances with former antagonists to help realize German democratization and recovery.
In an era of increasingly available digital resources, many textile designers and makers find themselves at an interesting juncture between traditional craft processes and newer digital technologies. ...Highly specialized craft/design practitioners may now elect to make use of digital processes in their work, but often choose not to abandon craft skills fundamental to their practice, and aim to balance the complex connection between craft and digital processes. The essays collected here consider this transition from the viewpoint of aesthetic opportunity arising in the textile designer's hands-on experimentation with material and digital technologies available in the present.
Craft provides the foundations for thinking within the design and production of textiles, and as such may provide some clues in the transition to creative and thoughtful use of current and future digital technologies. Within the framework of current challenges relating to sustainable development, globalization, and economic constraints it is important to interrogate and question how we might go about using established and emerging technologies in textiles in a positive manner.
Using the lenses of Porter’s value chain theory and pro-poor tourism strategies, the current study investigates the pro-poor value chain impacts of the handicraft sector in four tourist destinations ...in Ethiopia. The study employed a qualitative research approach with an exploratory design. We recruited research participants from relevant stakeholders using purposeful and convenient techniques. Data were collected using in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and personal observations. Research findings reveal that although the handicraft-based tourism activity in the study areas seems promising, the handicraft sector in the region is less pro-poor due to a lack of solid and sustainable value chain formation. Drawing upon its findings, the study develops a comprehensive handicraft value-chain framework that can serve as a blueprint for various rural area handicraft actors and destination planners. Policy-relevant implications, study limitations, and future research directions are also discussed.
This book brings together contributors from multiple disciplines, such as crafts, design, art education, cognitive philosophy, and sociology, to discuss craft and design practice from an embodied ...perspective.
Through theoretical overviews of embodied cognition and research-based cases that involve the researchers' making experiences, different phenomena of human-material interaction are presented, analysed, and discussed. The practical cases exemplify ways in which embodied notions show up in action. Contributors examine topics such as the embodied basis of craft activities and material manipulation, experiential knowledge and skill learning, reflection in and on action, and material dialogues. Several chapters specifically discuss the hybrid forms of analogue and digital crafting that increasingly takes place in the field of crafts and design, and the changed notions of material engagement that this entails.
The book will appeal to scholars of crafts, design, art education, anthropology, and sociology.
Today it is not uncommon to find items in department stores that are hand-crafted in countries like Thailand and Costa Rica. These traditional crafts now make up an important part of a global market. ...They support local and sometimes national economies and help create and solidify cultural identity. But these crafts are not necessarily indigenous. Whereas Thailand markets crafts with a long history and cultural legacy, Costa Rica has created a local handicraft tradition where none was known to exist previously.
In Global Markets and Local Crafts, Frederick F. Wherry compares the handicraft industries of Thailand and Costa Rica to show how local cultural industries break into global markets and, conversely, how global markets affect the ways in which artisans understand, adapt, and utilize their cultural traditions. Wherry develops a new framework for studying globalization by considering the phenomenon from the perspective of the supplier instead of the market. Drawing from interviews and extensive fieldwork shadowing artisans and exporters in their daily dealings, Wherry offers a rare account of globalization in motion—and what happens when market negotiations do not proceed as planned.
Considering economic and political forces, flows of people and materials, and frames that define cultural and market situations as they play out in the artisan communities of these two countries, Wherry uncovers how authentic folk tradition is capitalized or created.
