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CAREful or CAREless? Collaborative Making and Social Engagement through Craft

Sociologist Richard Sennet’s recent work Together, the Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation explores the potential material craftsmanship and social cooperation have to proffer social analyses. This peer-reviewed article proposes craft, as medium and process, has unique potential to engage individuals and communities in dialogue through making which bridges differences of culture, age and identity. The paper focuses on the AHRC-funded Co-Creating CARE (Community Asset-based Research & Enterprise) project. CARE is a partnership between Craftspace (Birmingham), Voluntary Arts England, Dublin’s Bealtaine Festival (Age and Opportunity) and Falmouth University, working with hobby craft groups to explore how new digital technologies are enabling collaborative craft engagements.

The article appears in the bi-annual journal Engage of the Arts Council England-funded organisation ‘Engage in the Visual Arts’ which represents gallery, art and education professionals in the UK and over 20 countries worldwide. Engage promotes the access, enjoyment and understanding of visual arts through gallery education. Engage 33 focuses on critical crafts with articles addressing craft attitudes, skills, learning and definitions, digital crafts, hierarchies and difference, collaboration and interdisciplinarity. CARE is one of a number of AHRC-funded projects exploring innovative approaches to co-creation and co-design and it focuses on the ‘small stories’ (exchanges, responses, reflections) of collaborative making. Dr .Hackney is the Principal Investigator for CARE (£120,000). The Engage article additionally draws on research from related funded projects undertaken under the AHRC Connected Communities funding stream including: Community-Appropriated Research Model (CARM) (Follow-on funding) PI Prof. Ann Light, Co-I Dr. Hackney (£100,000), exploring learning co-produced using the medium of community radio, and Connecting Craft and Communities (Network) PI: Dr. Thomas, Exeter University, Co-I Dr. Hackney & Dr. Bunnell (Falmouth) (£34,000).