Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Selected topics in areas not currently offered within the undergraduate course offerings. Students may take more than one offering of LBST Selected Topics courses for credit, as long as the topic for each offering is different.

COURSE DETAILS:

Craft: Material Work in a Digital Age

How do we account for the recent popular enthusiasm for the local, artisanal and handmade? Does the preponderance of artisanally produced commodities suggest a shift in contemporary consumer culture beyond or against the centralized mass production of the industrial period, or do localist and ‘maker’ movements simply reflect the increasingly diffuse nature of production of the digital age? More importantly, what do these changes mean for labour and the conditions workers face in an ever more precarious world of work?

This special seminar will interrogate the category of craft in historical and contemporary context. It will begin by considering the historical transformation of dominant forms of work from pre-industrial capitalism, through the industrial revolution and on to the informationally mediated labour context of today, questioning the role of the artisan, the piece-worker, and the homeworker throughout these profound political economic shifts. It will move on to track the histories and narratives of craft and craft-worker movements from Victorian England to the 1960s counter-culture to punk subcultures and on to today’s localist and makers’ movements. Finally, the course will look at specific case studies of popular craft industries such as artisanal foods and drinks, hand-made furniture and décor, and digitally-mediated craft marketplaces, such as Etsy, to better understand the working arrangements, worker identities/cultures and potentials for collective organizing that these industries and others like them present.

Concepts relating to precarity, feminism, colonialism and ideology will be woven throughout these explorations in order to provide opportunities for critical examination of cultural narratives that might, at first glance, seem benign but that, under further scrutiny, might also obscure relations of exploitation, atomization, and reinforcement of social privilege and exclusion.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

This course is intended to introduce students to an area of inquiry that has, until recently, remained peripheral to the broader field of Labour Studies. Ideally, the course will serve as an orientation to theoretical interpretations of small-scale material work in the 21st century, but applied to specific and often local contexts (Vancouver). It will challenge students to critically examine and interpret narratives of creativity, artisanry, and localism and to weigh these against the political economic backdrops of precarity, austerity, and neoliberal governance. Students will also have the opportunity to reflect on or develop their own craft practices (hobby or otherwise) and to consider how these fit within the theoretical framework of the course.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

RECOMMENDED READING: