Stories from the workshop: Communicative practices amongst crafts practitioners

Abstract

My research argues that craft practice and language are not antithetical and maintains that professionally situated talk-in-interaction is fundamentally constuitive of a craft-person’s epistemological standpoint.

I proceed from a crafts literature that maintains that “craft and theory are like oil and water” (Dormer 1997) and that “an object that ticks all the craft boxes…may not present an interesting case for theoretical discourse” (Adamson 2007). This orthodoxy has kept language, and practice at a distance from each other. My critical point of departure is that this canonical view, what Gee (2004) would class as big-D Discourse(s), effectively connotes a genre from the top-down thus predetermining what type of ‘theory’ and what ‘theoretical case’ might be. I counter this essentialising, etic, view of craft practice by locating the small-d discourses of crafts-people’s talk-in-interaction through ethnographic, observation and recording. In orienting to an emic approach I argue for the vital role of language in underpinning craft knowledge. My theoretical and analytical approach to this data is grounded in narrative research and its commitment to apprehending human experience (see Bruner 1986) and revealing the realities that are bound up in spontaneous, unplanned everyday uses of language-in-practice. Drawing upon ‘small story’ research, orienting to emergent, ongoing tellings (see Georgakopoulou 2007) these ‘stories from the workshop’ can be cast against orthodox, paradigmatic, carefully written, abstract institutional Discourse(s) (see Hymes 1996).

This paper will use short transcripts of professionally-situated talk-in-interaction amongst craftspeople and present an analysis of their uses of language. I will show that language plays an important role in constituting particular epistemological standpoints that breach canonical typifications craft epistemologies that are predicated wholly upon practical skill knowledge, (see Gates 2013 a, b, and Mackovy 2010 for discussions).These social interactions go some way, (in returning to the crafts literature), to address Harrod’s concern of the lack of a “common language that made sense of this multiplicity of activities” (Harrod 1999) as they reveal a complex inter-disciplinary communicative nexus of meaning-making.

References
Adamson, G. (2007) Thinking Through Craft. Berg.
Bruner, J (1986) Two Modes of Thought. In Actual Minds Possible Worlds. Harvard University Press.
Dormer, P. (1997) The Language and Practical Philosophy of Craft in P. Dormer (ed.) The Culture of Craft. Manchester University Press
Gates, D. (2013)a History in the Making, The Use of Talk in Interdisciplinary Craft Practice. In Sandino, L and Partington M (eds.) Oral History in the Visual Arts. Bloomsbury.
Gates, D. (2013)b The Trouble With Verbs: Tools and Language. In preparation for publication, Chipstone Foundation.