Sustainability in the Making: Radical Craft and the Roots of Eco-Social Change

Building on prior work into the cultural role of artisanship and makerspaces, this research focuses on the potential role of craft programmes to promote and enable cultures of sustainability.
The project aims to understand UK craft ecologies in relation to sustainable behaviours, to establish how a maker literacy for sustainability transition can be developed and integrated into specific social and cultural contexts. The research focuses on the existing craft ecosystem in the Devon area, aiming to also to provide clarity on how maker initiatives cope with the environmental crisis, how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their approach, and how the participation in such initiatives influences everyday material cultures.

It is expected that an understanding of the Devon maker social context will provide deeper insights on how knowledge is generated through making and will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the role culture plays in sustainability and environmental discourse. These results will establish a framework for implementing and evaluating programme(s) for craft-led pro-sustainability change.

Sustainability in the Making is a PhD project that explores how craft and making contribute in building cultures of sustainability.
Cultures of sustainability are collective systems of knowledge and customs rooted in environmental and ecological values, which allow both individuals and communities to adopt more environmentally-friendly behaviours, lifestyles, and norms.
Many studies on sustainable craft focus on the way makers embody sustainability in their creative process: for example how they use recycled or upcycled materials, create artefacts using local resources, or make objects with specific sustainable purposes. This PhD, however, looks at sustainable craft from a different perspective, which sees craft and making as social activities through which people share, transform, and create cultural values, like preserving traditions, building local identities, sharing worldviews, creating a sense of place or collective histories.
By connecting this definition of sustainable craft with cultures of sustainability, this PhD asks if and how craft can be a vehicle to build sustainability cultures and aims to answer this question by studying existing craft programmes that promote specific environmental, ecological, and sustainable approaches through making.