[Commlist] CfP: Special Issue on contemporary craft work and digital craft economies

Special Issue Call for Papers: Contemporary craft work and digital craft 
economies

Craft work can no longer be imagined as separate from the digital. More 
than a decade after Susan Luckman’s formative description of the “aura 
of analogue” (Luckman, 2013), craft work and craft economies have 
undergone a great deal of digitization, shifting and blurring the 
meanings and associations of long-stable and discrete categories. For  
instance, “artisanal manufacturing” used to be an oxymoron; today it 
describes a type of manual labour increasingly understood as offering 
opportunities for authenticity, creativity, and fulfillment. Digital 
media and craft have never been mutually exclusive, of course, but craft 
work and artisanal labour have garnered new appreciation for their 
pre-digital tools and processes, akin to the rearticulated pleasures 
that now purportedly flow from consuming non-digital media. However, 
contemporary appreciations of handmade commodities tend to traffic in 
nostalgia and obscure a more complicated set of lived relationships 
among craft workers and their tools, many of which not only utilize 
digital technology but owe much of their resurgence to the affordances 
of digital platforms. Craft workers sell their wares on digital 
platforms, tailor instructional videos for streaming services, and 
source their raw materials from online marketplaces.

Established forms of work are always changing in response to 
technological shifts, and craft is no different. For instance, concepts 
like “neo craft” (Gandini and Gerosa, 2023; Gandini 2025) account for 
craft’s embeddedness with global, digital markets while capturing a 
growing discontent with white collar work. Contemporary craft work is 
still (too) often imagined as exclusively the realm of the analog, or as 
an antidote to digital saturation, but contemporary craft economies are 
increasingly impossible without engagement with digital technology. And 
digital craft economies feel increasingly unstable as well as inevitable 
or unavoidable. Digital platforms have become fraught places to sell 
and  source, with platform owners taking a larger share of craft sales. 
Advanced automation and AI challenge established notions of authenticity 
within craft. Craft workers  increasingly enter the gig economy. 
Algorithms nudge crafters to make, promote, and sell their wares in 
specific ways which are amenable to advertising dollars and circulation 
in the attention economy. The internet is simultaneously fracturing and 
consolidating craft markets under the purview of fewer, larger, and more 
powerful players, not only all- encompassing behemoths like Amazon, but 
also “crafty” platforms like Etsy. In light of these developments, craft 
feels as if it is on a precipice: how can craft economies survive in 
these new conditions, and what do craft workers want that survival to 
look like?

This proposal is for an upcoming special issue which has received strong 
interest from a leading cultural studies journal. We welcome theoretical 
inquiry, case studies, and  research papers which address the 
complicated and perhaps inextricable relations between craft, analog and 
digital technology, and the conditions of artisanal culture and 
digitized commerce. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

*Cultural exchange via craft work online
*Practices and beliefs of digital craft communities
*Craft and the gig economy
*Rentierism and exploitation on digital craft platforms
*The role of algorithmic sorting on digital platforms within craft 
communities
*Philosophical inquiry into craft as a salient category in a digitized 
cultural economy
*Changes in access to craft after digitization as a mode of work along 
lines of gender, race, and sexual orientation
*The role of influencers in the broader craft economy
*New challenges to craft work from AI and other forms of advanced automation
*Craft’s relation to industry and regimes of mass production
*The changing role of video in craft instruction after TikTok/Reels

Send abstracts (250-500) words to Ian Williams at 
(igwillia /at/ live.unc.edu) or Michael Palm at (mpalm /at/ unc.edu) by March 5, 2026. 
No payment from authors will be required.
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