AAG Call for Papers:
GEOGRAPHIES OF CRAFT AND CRAFTING
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
24-28 February 2012
New York, NY
Organisers: Doreen Jakob (University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill), Hayden Lorimer and Kendra Strauss (University of Glasgow) and
Nicola Thomas (University of Exeter)
Sponsored by the AAG Cultural Geography Study Group and the Economic
Geography Specialty Group.
From provisioning (sewing and knitting garments, woodworking and
ironmongery etc.) to communal forms of socialisation (quilting bees,
knitting circles) to local markets (craft fairs, farmers¹ markets),
crafts and crafting have been variously regarded: as peripheral
(residual, non-capitalist) forms of production; as the locus of
anti-capitalist politics; as an ideal model for cottage-scale
entrepreneurialism; and, as the essence of vernacular material
culture. When kept from public view, crafts have also long operated as
a means of personal fulfilment, self-expression, and domestic
decoration to celebrate and commemorate notable events in the life of
family or friends. As such, the practices and politics of craft
encompass a wide variety of forms of social reproduction and have been
at the centre of a range of social movements for centuries. A critical
awareness of these politics and practices has also informed the
cultural appreciation of craft in the creative arts, and its more
traditional variant of Œfolk art¹.
The emergence of ‘third wave’ crafting in the 1990s, and the meteoric
rise of technologies and applications associated with it – from Etsy
to DIY videos on YouTube – has seen the craft movement re-emerge as a
social, economic and cultural movement of significance and scope. To
date, limited but important work by geographers has looked at craft in
relation to the fine arts and creative industries, mostly from
cultural and historical geography perspectives. This session aims to
bring together scholars from a range of backgrounds to grapple with
the complexities and contradictions of crafting from a variety of
theoretical, methodological and empirical starting points. In it we
ask: What are the geographies cultural, political, feminist,
localist, aesthetic, economic, racial, urban, rural – of craft and
crafting?
The craft movement is socially and spatially heterogeneous. Such
diversity raises a series of questions that might constitute an
incipient research agenda. In its different manifestations how does
the craft movement embody tensions, linkages and power hierarchies
that both challenge and reflect socially-constructed categories of
difference such as gender, class, race, ethnicity and sexuality? How
do crafting practices and discourses vary within and between urban and
rural environments, regions, and nations? How does contemporary
crafting reflect and co-construct diverse politics, from radical
feminist ‘craftivist’ to middle-class urban nostalgia to
traditionalist conservative? In relation to labour, is crafting
simultaneously invoked as a route to entrepreneurial independence and
(as it has been historically) as an alternative to capitalist
alienated labour? How is craft to be defined in relation to art, the
artistic labour process and spaces of artistic practice (such as
galleries and art schools)? In what ways and among which communities
is craft used to encapsulate styles of life aiming to operate at a
slower tempo, or that are retrospective in character? How far is the
craft resurgence an expression of austerity chic ³keep calm and
carry on crafting²?
This session is intended to have a catalytic effect: prompting
discussion, encouraging networking and bringing together work that
represents a range of approaches to geographies of craft and crafting.
We envision papers that address one or more of the following themes:
1. craft, labour and social reproduction
2. Œcraftivism¹ and the politics of craft and crafting
3. crafts, hobbies and forgetting: vernacular histories and
geographies of making in everyday communities
4. the spatialities of crafts and crafting
5. the influence of technology in crafting
6. the economics of crafting: its commercialization & capitalization
7. festivals of crafts/crafts as tools for urban and economic development
8. the changing social status of the crafter, craftsmanship and the
master craftsman
We welcome contributions that explore conceptual issues,
methodological approaches and practice-led or object-centred inquiries
into the doing and making of crafts.
Please email abstracts of 250 words or less by September 8th 2011 to
Doreen (djakob@email.unc.edu), Kendra (Kendra.strauss@ges.gla.ac.uk)
and Hayden (hlorimer@ges.gla.ac.uk).
