About the project

Artisanal practices have taken on new and more diverse characteristics as the local has become an important site of action linked to supply chain impacts, global mobilities (or their absence), and the need to be more attentive to how and where we shop and produce.

Yet, the issue of affordability continues to haunt the contemporary artisanal sector, with the higher cost of the artisanal raising ongoing questions about equality and access. Who is able to ‘turn to the local’ (either as a producer or consumer), and what does this mean for the sustainability and growth of local artisanal production?

To answer these questions, the project builds upon the previous collaborative work of the CIs, bringing together their respective expertise as media and cultural scholars exploring food (Associate Professor Michelle Phillipov) and craft (Professor Susan Luckman) economies and their social worlds. Through this joint research, we have identified multiple alignments between food and craft economies and the ways in which they have become vehicles for a larger reimagining of ideals of production and consumption across much of the Global North. Central to this is the way that both sectors mobilise similar, and often intertwined, discourses that champion the local alongside other powerful cultural ideals around authenticity, retreat, and the celebration of the artisanal.