Viability and Sustainability of Creative Practices, Crafts and Traditional Industry Sectors

Contemporary practices of craft are increasingly associated with progressive agendas of gender emancipation, environmental sustainability and locally rooted ethical production and consumption. This presentation explores the ‘political economy of craft’ as an embodied and experiential practice, towards situating craft as a rich form of cultural wisdom. The research focuses on Fair Isle and Sanquhar knitting as a body of knowledges and practices - viewed as a form of material cultural assets - which can support the future sustainability of craft practitioners, in distributed geographical contexts. In so doing cultural assets yield an emotional and intellectual approach that literally unpicks the political economy of craft exposing its relations to production whilst at the same time binding the interdependencies between innovation and tradition that contribute to the cultural life of communities.