[Commlist] CFP: Extending the Debate on Craft: Work, Precarity, and Organising in Artisanal Industries

We are writing to you today to draw your attention to our upcoming 
mini-conference “Extending the Debate on Craft: Work, Precarity, and 
Organising in Artisanal Industries,” part of the Society for the 
Advancement of Socio-Economics annual conference in Montreal in July 2025.
This mini-conference concerns work in the neo-craft, artisanal and 
hipster economies and is focused on advancing critical discussions of 
working conditions and pathways to worker organising. You can read the 
full CFP below, but take note that the hard deadline for submission of 
1000 word abstracts is 16 December 2024. The mini-conference will be 
held in Montreal from 9-12 July 2025 (in addition to a single virtual 
session hosted between 1-3 July 2025). We welcome submissions from a 
range of disciplines and on a variety of related topics. Submissions can 
be made at this link: 
https://sase.org/event/2025-montreal/#submission-guidelines

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Full CFP (also available here (Mini-conference 
2):https://sase.org/event/2025-montreal/#mini):

A rich stream of academic research now exists analysing the resurgence 
of ‘craft’ and ‘artisanal’ forms of production and consumption in the 
new millennium, which can be considered a ‘third wave of craft’ (Jakob 
2013). This resurgence has interested a broad spectrum of work 
configurations associated with the idea of prioritising human engagement 
over machine control (Kroezen et al. 2021). In particular, in addition 
to traditional forms of craft and DIY activities (Banks 2010; Luckman 
2015; Patel 2024) the third wave is characterised by the symbolic 
re-signifying of manual jobs belonging to the service sector as ‘craft’ 
or artisanal (Ocejo 2017), in what is being labelled as the ‘neo-craft 
economy’ (Gandini and Gerosa 2023; Land 2018). These new forms of craft 
are being consistently associated with authentic urban places (Zukin 
2010) and the modern urban middle class, characterised by inconspicuous 
consumption (Currid-Halkett 2017) and a culturally omnivorous ‘taste for 
the particular’ (Smith Maguire 2018). Despite its symbolic association 
with manual work and idealised imaginaries of the past (Bell, Dacin, and 
Toraldo 2021) in a movement ‘back to the future’ (Land 2018), the 
resurgence of craft also has deep connections with the development of 
the digital economy (Luckman 2020) and digital platforms, having itself 
become platformised (Gandini et al. 2024).

Overall, this third wave of craft is led by notions of craftsmanship 
(Sennett 2008) as an ideal of ‘good work’ against the alienation of 
‘bullshit jobs’ (Graeber 2018) and authenticity as a multi-faceted and 
powerful imaginary of consumption for both producers and customers 
(Gerosa 2024; Thurnell-Read 2019). From this point of view, the new 
resurgence of craft seems to re-propose in renewed ways the 
long-standing meanings attributed to craftwork in opposition to 
industrial work (Braverman 1998) and to craft objects in opposition to 
industrial consumption goods (see, e.g., the Arts and Crafts movement). 
It is no surprise then that craft and neo-craft economies are commonly 
associated with desires for a better future (Bell, Dacin, and Toraldo 
2021) and with progressive political sentiments, spanning from a 
critique of the industrial system and the consumer society (Ocejo, 2022) 
to more explicitly anti-capitalist visions. From artisan bakeries to 
craft breweries to heritage clothing producers, the neo-craft economy is 
one that promotes an image of quality and care, often discursively 
positioned as a counterweight to the impersonal, low-quality, and mass 
produced commodities of the mainstream, corporate economy.

More recently, a growing critical corpus of research is putting the 
craft and neo-craft phenomena under scrutiny. The explosion of “hipster” 
businesses and aesthetics has led to an increasing critical engagement 
concerning the impacts they have on urban space and communities (Wallace 
2019). Research has denounced the gendered nature of neo-craft work 
(Thurnell-Read 2022; Land, Sutherland, and Taylor 2018) and the racial 
inequalities characterising it (Patel and Dudrah 2022). Less  attention 
has been paid until now to the workers upon which the image of the craft 
economies is built in terms of their working conditions, realisation and 
exploitation, with few exceptions (see e.g., Delgaty and Wilson, 2023 
and Anderson, 2022). The terms artisan and craft both depend on an image 
of a skilled worker who is an expert in their particular skilled 
vocation. That this worker, and the army of “unskilled” workers that 
support their endeavors, are often left out of craft discourse 
altogether calls into question the degree to which these industries are 
actually committed to the espoused values of the neo-craft movement.

Although much of this work also deals with the attraction and benefits 
of neo-craft vocations, considerably less grapples with the class 
relations and composition of the neo-craft workforce.

As a partial response to this under researched, yet crucially important 
input into the craft economy, this mini-conference intends to bring 
together an interdisciplinary group of critical scholars engaging with 
the working conditions, class composition, and workplace cultures of 
neo-craft industries, broadly defined. We seek contributions that 
connect neo-craft work to relations of equality/inequality, 
opportunity/exploitation, vocation/class, and beyond. As such, potential 
themes may include, but are not limited to:

-Work exploitation and inequalities in the craft and neo-craft economy
-Precarity and entrepreneurialisation in craft and neo-craft work
-Critical accounts of craft purported progressivism and ‘coolness’
-Workers’ struggles and organising in the craft and neo-craft industries
-Class, gendered, and racial dimensions of craft and neo-craft work
-Postcolonial and decolonial analyses of craft and neo-craft work
-Challenging craft and neo-craft work from Global South perspectives
-Craft and/as a creative industry
-Materiality and immateriality in craft production
-Labour process analyses of craft and neo-craft work
-The blending of work and leisure in craft and making
-Valorisation of workers’ identity
-The labour aristocracy and hierarchies in neo-craft industries
-Contending conceptions of the hipster economy
-Craft, gentrification and urban change

Taken together, these themes will contribute to the SASE 2025 conference 
theme of Inclusive Solidarities. Critical discussions of the neo-craft 
economy hold the potential to reveal developing forms of exploitation 
and solidarity specific to the changing regime of accumulation in the 
21st century. Neo-craft is a peculiar development in the 21st century 
economy, one that exists at the nexus of the digital and material, that 
reproduces traditional forms of exploitation while increasingly 
depending on worker autonomy and creativity. Moreover, as a grouping of 
industries that celebrates diversity and inclusion at the same time that 
portions of its workforce are treated as interchangeable, it marks an 
important line of inquiry in considerations of inclusive solidarities 
and the interactions between worker identities and working-class 
interests. This mini-conference will add a critical dimension to the 
academic discourse on the neo-craft economy by critically examining its 
employment practices, its divisions of labour, and, ultimately, the 
pathways toward solidarity and organising on the part of its workers.

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