Critical Craft Forum began to bring together voices from the breadth of craft-focused communities to deepen critical and analytical dialogue about craft and culture. The Facebook component is an open forum for dialogue. Annual sessions at College Art Association address critical questions and issues in the scholarship, study and creation of contemporary craft.

The various blog posts will now appear on the Critical Craft Forum Facebook site, feeding conversations. Meanwhile, its Facebook activity will also appear alongside posts in the Journal of Modern Craft website. In this way, we can at the same time capture the moment in lively Facebook conversations and retain a memory of enduring themes in archived blog posts.
If you do Facebook, you are encouraged to join Critical Craft Forum here.

The Best of Both Worlds: International Collaborations in Craft & Design
Saturday 22 October 2011 5-7pm
National Institute of Fashion Technology amphitheatre Green Park, New Delhi, India (see map)

‘The Best of Both Worlds’ considers the increasing number of transnational partnerships being forged between craft and design. How can we combine the free-wheeling possibilities of modern capitalist world with the grounded meaning of cultural traditions?

Typically, a designer from a wealthy Western country seeks to produce something handmade using skills of a traditional artisan. While this does seem to reinforce global inequalities, it is often the best alternative for those seeking to sustain their craft. So how can designers and artisans work together in product development as a fair partnership? How can designers work with artisans in a way that respects their unique contribution? What is the role for Indian designers in these new transnational supply chains?

This forum is part of Sangam: The Australia India Design Platform, which is a three year program of events designed to promote creative design partnerships between Australia and India. It includes roundtables, forums and workshops in Melbourne and Delhi, Sydney and Ahmedabad, and Brisbane and Bangalore. To support partnerships, a code of practice for creative collaborations is being developed.

Come join in a public forum to consider the opportunities for craft and design through international partnerships. Hear from leading innovative designers and craftspersons in Australia and India, including Trent Jansen, Ishan Khosla, Matthew Butler and Sandra Bowkett. Consider the role of ethical consumerism in generating opportunities in craft, fashion, design and social justice.

Sangam (‘confluence’) is a strategic initiative of the Visual Arts Board (Australia Council) and supported by the Australia India Institute. It is located in the Ethical Design Laboratory, a research area of RMIT Centre for Design. Visit www.sangamproject.net for more information and register for updates.

16 March 2011, 6.30pm

Lecture Theatre 1, RCA Kensington

Sustain Talks VI: Craftiness

Free, no reservations, places allocated on a first-come, first-served basis

Can craft be a tool for achieving sustainability in your creative work? And just how crafty do you need to be to make a success of it?

Chair: Sarah Teasley, Tutor, Critical & Historical Studies/History of Design

Student graduate speaker: Dejan Mitrovic, MA Innovation Design Engineering (2010)

Cyndi Rhoades, multi-award-winning social entrepreneur who’s refashioning approaches to textile waste and ethical clothing; Lizzie Harrison, whose ReMade project is upskilling a community of women and producing a recycled clothing brand; and Sophie Thomas, co-founder of the UK’s leading sustainable graphic design studio and passionate advocate for sustainable materials use, apply their collective design skills to unpicking how rethinking materials use and traditional skills can help us to create a more sustainable approach to making.

• crafted approaches to filmmaking, taking in the skills aspects of single-screen and expanded or multi-screen practice.
• documentaries that emphasise the ‘production of knowledge’. Many of John Grierson’s GPO documentaries of the 1930s, for example, are very clear and instructive on how objects are made, and they often focus on craft industrial processes (such as Flaherty’s ‘Industrial Britain’, which features glass and ceramics).
• Animation as a specially ‘crafted’ art form, especially in its strongly artisanal aspect, taking in Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye and others.
• The craft of film design from posters to sets to innovative graphic credits.
• Films about craft. These are a strong subset of films-about-the-arts and many of them very inventive and pioneering. Rodney Wilson, now at the BBC, commissioned many of these for the Arts Council from the 70s to the 90s. The collection can be viewed on a website via the University of Westminster, where they have been curated/digitalised by Joram ten Brink.
• the digital revolution and the change of craft skills it has brought, which links to the ‘do-it-yourself’ era, which has brought film and video making and editing into easily accessible software.
• Historical texts that address some aspect of craft in relation to film, as part of our on-going primary text series.

Although historical literature has mostly produced views on the rise of new technologies, recent studies have offered new perspectives on the social uses of things and the role of technology in the everyday fashioning of social order. Inspired by the sociology of science, the SCOT programme (Social Construction of Technology), based on the study of individual items, greatly contributed to this new point of view, discussing how technologies were socially defined and constructed. This constructivist turn, which took place in the 1980s, strongly influenced French pragmatic sociology, with greater attention on actors and their agencies. In this context, technology became a new and richer instrument to understand the social and political order. New research in social science, questioning technological practices, has flourished (Gilbert Simondon, Bruno Latour…). However, it paradoxically remains underrepresented in 19th century studies, technology being appended to economic and industrial history.

Yet, the nineteenth century underwent a fast-growing spread of technological equipment, as well as faith in technology and its liberal endowment, which thus became characteristic to advanced capital societies. In addition, 19th century everyday life was dramatically changed by technological items.

Internalist studies of structures and “technological systems” (BertrandGilles) have become one way to analyze technology experienced in everyday life, through the analysis of social actors, representations, practices and negotiations. Social studies used new methodologies, such as direct or participant observation, frame and interaction analysis, or had recourse to family or life histories. Historians developed new thinking on tools and methodology implied by technological study: it supposed the taking into consideration of common people’s creativity and the ongoing tricks they employed to make their way into the crowd of goods (Michel de Certeau). In this perspective, technological items and their systems dynamically acquired identities through their uses and forms. Contrasting with the dominant perspective of possession, dominant in material culture studies until recently, consumption studies have recently analyzed the successive mutations of artefacts, from their trade to their social uses, and, extending 18th century studies on uses of technology, have underlined their marketing, retailing and publicity.

In terms of space, devices circulated between the public and domestic spheres, with that of labour. It also circulated at local or international scale, in rural areas, colonial or extra-European regions. The special issue aims at presenting new ways of writing the history of technology, between technological theories and social practices. Methodological shifts and original documentation – private and trade archives – or new approaches to classic sources for historians of technology – adverts, textbooks or patents.

Three main areas, as well as cross-sections, will be privileged:

Social practices and technologies at work

Diversions, bypassing, odd jobs and other social practices that shaped the daily uses of technologies in workshops, factories, canteens will be analyzed.

• Invisible or discreet innovations (adaptations of machines to singular uses, diversions of normalized procedures…)
• Technologies of order and disorder in workshops (clockworks, bells, fences and others tools for the control of behaviours)
• Noises and smells of technology; hygienic artefacts
• Gender and generation differentiation in the tools and machines’ -Work on the side, resistances, recoveries…

Practices of artefacts in the domestic sphere

Questions about technologies in the domestic sphere can also help to think about daily life social practices:

• Home artefacts (sewing machines, washing machines, amateurs’ machines…)
• Building apparatus (hygienic equipments, heating systems, lightings, safety devices…)
• Body and medical equipments, clothing (corsets, opera hats…)…
• Technological and scientific toys
• Attempts for reforming daily life, in particular in utopian experiences (phalansteries, familistères…)

Techniques and narratives

Following Stephen Bann or Jonathan Crary, papers will analyze the numerous cross-sections between the arts, shows, narratives and technology.

• Copy, reproduction… (tour à portraits, photography, oleography, Collas’ system of reduction, photosculpture, casts…)
• Machinery of art (pantographs, cameras, photographic devices…)
• Narrative machines (stereoscopes, magic lanterns, cinematographs…)
• Writing and printing (writing, filing, counting, copying, duplicating…)
• Amateurs’ artefacts (pyrography, cameras…)
• Communication apparatuses (the telegraph, the telephone…)
• Sound and music tools (phonographs, pianola…)…

Contributions will be sent to Manuel Charpy and François Jarrige : manuel.charpy@wanadoo.fr and fjarrige1@gmail.com

· February 28, 2011: deadline for proposal submission (5,000 characters max.)

· September 2011: workshop in Paris, with discussants · Publication: late 2012

Creative Commons license for Project Dinner Table sourced from flickr

- Go to the home page at www.journalofmoderncraft.com
- Click the link for ‘Create an account’ on the top right of the sidebar (or login with Facebook if you prefer)
- Create a profile with a user name (lowercase without spaces) , details about yourself and image
- Respond to the authentication email
- Read the welcome message to learn how you can contribute to the Table

Please, have a seat!

Coined by artists and collectives in the wake of the September 11^th, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the term “craftivism” relates to creative, traditional handcraft (often, assisted by high-tech means of community-building, skill-sharing, and action) directed toward political and social causes. For this special issue of Utopian Studies, we invite practitioners, scholars, and curators to submit work related to the history, criticism, and myriad practices of craftivism. Subjects and strategies might include: historical or present examples of activist practice that uses craft; issues of production, manufacture or use that might intersect with craftivism; discussions of the successes or limits of craftivist practice; considerations of feminist craft practice that traverse (or are collapsed into) wider social issues and movements. Papers might also take a wider frame, looking at craft and economic globalization, NGO work or the use of craft in cultural brokering. Please note that this issue’s editors are interested in praxis as well as scholarship, and encourage makers to submit statements, manifestos, and/or imagery for consideration.

Utopian Studies is a biannual, peer-reviewed journal publishing scholarly articles on a wide range of subjects related to utopias, utopianism, utopian literature, utopian theory, and intentional communities. All submissions must be sent by JANUARY 17^TH 2011 via the journal’s online editorial manager at: http://www.editorialmanager.com/uts/ Utopian Studies’ submission guidelines are also available online: http://www.utoronto.ca/utopia/journal/guidelines.html

Queries concerning the issue’s theme and guidelines may be directed to the guest editors via e-mail: Maria Elena Buszek: maria.buszek@ucdenver.edu and Kirsty Robertson: kirsty.robertson@uwo.ca

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Carbon Issue: Sustainability in Craft & Design

craft + design enquiry is seeking papers for the Carbon Issue: Sustainability in Craft & Design.

This issue welcomes academic papers documenting research that contributes to an understanding of sustainability as a context for craft and design. This understanding ranges from the practical to the symbolic.

Papers can include:

• A review historical movements such as the Arts & Crafts movement or Bauhaus
• A reflection on current craft and design projects
• An engagement with contemporary sustainability discourse
• A speculation on the future of craft and design in a world more than two degrees warmer than today
• A critical examination of the relationship between sustainability and aesthetics

More information here and discussion here.

Journal website: www.craftaustralia.org.au/cde

• Monday, March 29, from 6 to 8pm
• Library of the Paul Mellon Centre in Bedford Square, London WC1B 3JA

Copies of the book will be available for £20 (cheaper than Amazon!).

craft reader launch