Craft History Workshop
https://crafthistoryworkshop.com/

This seminar series invites new considerations of craft in an expanded historical and methodological field. Recent art-historical scholarship on craft tends to emphasize the mechanisms and markets of contemporary art, or positions craft as a phenomenon arising specifically through the dialectics of industrial modernity. But this is not the only way we can define and frame craft. Even during the rise of the mass-produced modern world, craft remained integrated in industrial capitalism, not as its “other” but (as Raphael Samuel famously showed) part of its development and operation. Nor has modernity been the only driver of change: craft’s rich pre- and early-modern transformations deserve explicit attention as well. Furthermore, craft has an ongoing present beyond the specific frame of Western affluence; in the global South and in marginalized communities within the global North, craft’s enduring importance as a cultural technology and an economic engine (rather than a rarefied form of opposition to mass culture) can remain somewhat elusive when we look primarily through the conceptual prism of art history. Researchers from a wide variety of fields have recognized craft’s central role—both in historical research and contemporary practice—in discourses of decoloniality. Rethinking craft in terms of these long and tangled histories can elicit new questions, challenges, and connections.

The Craft History Workshop aims to enrich our historical understanding of craft as more than a byproduct of a hand-versus-machine dichotomy; rather, craft is a complex mesh woven between knowledge, skill, and materiality across the many contexts of human making. We welcome papers that consider the history of craft (in any period, from prehistory to the present) from a broad range of disciplines and approaches, including but by no means limited to art and design history, material culture studies, anthropology and archaeology, histories of science and technology, economics and public policy, and conservation.

Proposed contributions might engage notions of craft and artisan economies from the local to the global; craftwork and labor organization; decoloniality in and through craft; artisanal epistemologies; craft practices within the spheres of mass, industrial, or digital production; historiographies and categorizations of craft; processes of knowledge transfer; or histories of specific materials and their agency—among many other potential topics.

Format & Proposals

In the spirit of our title, we envision this as a less-formal space to discuss research still in development. Emerging and early-career scholars, museum and heritage professionals, craft practitioners, and those working outside the traditional spaces and structures of academia are particularly encouraged to participate.

All presentations will be online via Zoom, followed by discussion. We welcome contributions from anywhere in the world and will try to accommodate different time zones as much as possible.

Send talk proposals of around 300 words to crafthistoryworkshopgmail.com. Talks should be a maximum of 30 minutes in length, allowing for substantial time for discussion in a one-hour meeting. Please also include a CV, link to a personal website, or biographical statement indicating your interests in and experiences with craft and craft history. The submission deadline for consideration for the Fall 2021 seminar season is July 31, 2021.