European Journal of Cultural Studies

Craft as a creative industry has received increased public, academic and policy attention in recent years. However, this tends to centre on a Westernised, white, middle-class version of craft practice associated with values of authenticity, the valorisation of the handmade, and ‘hipster’ culture. At the same time, despite a rich body of work on inequalities in the cultural industries, some of which is published in this journal, little attention has been given to craft. These matters are addressed in this special issue which interrogates the character and workings of the contemporary craft economy and provides much needed insight into experiences of inequality in the sector, drawing on research from the Global North and South. It also includes Cultural Commons contributions from Susan Luckman, Carol Tulloch and Saskia Warren which reflect on various aspects of contemporary craft.

This article focuses on the relationship between inequality, expertise and cultural value in UK professional craft. Drawing on interviews with ethnically diverse women makers, I explore how getting their craft skills recognised and valued as expertise hinders their ability to establish a full-time career in craft. This is because judgements of craft expertise are largely predicated on aesthetic codes and classifications which are historically racialised, gendered and classed. In order to address these exclusionary processes, I argue that expertise in craft, which refers to the practical skills of production and the capacities of the maker, should be more central to evaluative judgements. I draw on Janet Wolff’s work on community evaluation to discuss how evaluative judgements about craft expertise can be less universalizing and instead located within specific contexts and communities. I propose that community evaluation could help to reframe what ideas of craft expertise are and address existing inequalities in the sector.

Susan Luckman, citing Katherine Gibson’s call for a return to ‘the grass-roots work of engaging the community and being open to developing new economies’, advocates a vision of creative industries that builds the affordances of ‘edge-places of creativity’. Luckman’s focus is non-urban localities. Her proposal, nevertheless, could equally apply to the amateur craft groups, community organisations and independent businesspeople that the Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded projects Co-Producing CARE: Community Asset-based Research and Enterprise, and Maker-Centric: Building Place-based, Co-making Communities worked with in deprived inner-city areas in the British Midlands. Both projects were undertaken with Craftspace and other stakeholder organisations, worked collaboratively with community groups, employed co-production processes and combined hand-making with digital fabrication. The aim of each project was to prototype a method with communities that builds agencies (cultural, social, economic, skills-based) through making and could be applied by other groups. While the CARE method was concerned with the affordances of collaborative making, Maker-Centric looked at these through a heritage and placed-based lens. This article examines the potential for local, collaborative, purposeful, social making as an ‘edge-place’ activity for creative enterprise that is inclusive and supportive.

Creative intermediaries are increasingly recognised for their role in facilitating the growth and development of creative entrepreneurs and creative and cultural industries. There is also a growing interest in the role of creative and cultural industries in developing economies, for economic development but also cultural engagement and social change. In this article, we bring a Global South perspective to the study of creative intermediaries in the craft sector by exploring how they engage with makers and markets for craft products in Cape Town, South Africa and beyond. Using qualitative interviews with key players from four intermediary organisations working at the community level through to luxury export, we present their different business models and approaches to supporting the development of the craft sector and makers. We reflect on the role they play in addressing inequalities, especially in opportunities to access craft careers and develop sustainable livelihoods for disadvantaged communities. We also consider some of the key challenges these intermediaries face in relation to policy, infrastructure, finance and global competition. The article argues for the value of adopting an ecological perspective in studying the role of craft intermediaries to recognise their role in addressing inequalities in accessing craft careers and the importance of support for makers at different stages in their professional development.

This article examines women’s shifting roles in the production of handwoven cloth in Sumba, Indonesia. The main themes that emerge are the invisible labor of women and the production of a self-empowered entrepreneurial, gendered, laboring subjectivity that works in tandem with a housewife ideology firmly situated in a ‘new’ liberal patriarchy. The inequalities emerging from these shifts are parallel to inequalities produced through neoliberalization of global south craft communities in a context of global markets and tourist-oriented production. The discussion in this article is based on case studies drawn from over 50 interviews conducted during field visits and continued remotely when away from the field in Lambanapu and Praillu regions in Waingapu of Sumba, Indonesia. Overall, our analysis reveals how cultural work in this global south context reproduces a Westernized, neoliberal patriarchy even as it allows for individualized expressions of women’s agency.`

There is growing interest in creative graduate skillsets, but so far there has been limited investigation of the specific skills and resource requirements of early-career crafts graduates. Drawing on qualitative interviews and quantitative rankings of skills and resources conducted with 25 graduates from four higher education providers in England, this article examines the role and relative priority of different skills and resources in establishing a professional practice. It is identified that the skills and resources key to professional practice are highly interrelated, and proposed that the diverse requirements for professional practice should be understood as an amalgam rather than isolated components, with the acquisition of skills and resources seen as accumulative. The potential for a lack of key resources to exacerbate inequalities in who can enter and work in the craft economy is discussed and recommendations made for initiatives that could help to address an unequal distribution of resources.

Deirdre Figueiredo MBE is Director of Craftspace, an organisation in Birmingham, United Kingdom, which supports contemporary craft. For over 30 years, Craftspace has been working with communities and artists to challenge and push boundaries in craft, and Deirdre has been at the forefront for most of that time. In this conversation with special issue editor Dr Karen Patel, Deirdre reflects on her career in the craft sector and her own intersectional experience, and discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement on contemporary craft.

‘If I Don’t Do Some Couching I Will Burst’ was the explanation I gave to Dr. Amy Twigger-Holroyd to explain my need to make in order to feel more balanced due to work commitments generally, and during the Covid-19 pandemic in particular, and why I drew on couching as a stitch to achieve this. It was not until writing this essay about ‘The Piece’ I stitched in 2021 to stop me from ‘bursting’, that I realised the centrality of the work to expanded meanings of self-care.‘The Piece’ links my claims for psychological space, physical making space, camaraderie with like-minded makers and a quest for wholeness, all taking place within my home, in order to achieve the space that Louise Bourgeois refers to as being ‘‘a metaphor for the structure of our existence’ (Lorz 2015).