(Re)Making. Craft-Design and Women’s Empowerment in the Global South The Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies

Summary

Around the world, women’s craft-design groups operate quietly but effectively across many areas of making from ceramics and textiles to beadwork and basketry.

Often established as co-operatives, and acting as not-for-profit providers for upskilling, income provision, empowerment and sustainability, women’s handicraft groups play a vital role in numerous urban communities globally. Yet women’s designer-maker groups, particularly those of low-income areas of the global South (or global majority), have still to receive significant attention from design historians.

We argue that this results in a dual inequality; the present limited recognition of such enterprises by the academic discipline compounding the often marginalised economic, social and visual-cultural spheres that women’s craft initiatives occupy as organisations.

Seeking to redress this imbalance, we organised a conference held in March 2024 to shed light on these issues. In particular we  sought  to posit women’s craft-design as offering an alternative to western / global Northern, capitalist modes of production; remaking approaches and understandings of products as well as designed artefacts themselves.

The conference attracted an international audience and speakers similarly came from across the globe.

Speakers