Book Review: Craft as a Creative Industry

(Karen Patel: London and New York: Routledge, 2024)

Abstract

Karen Patel’s new book, Craft as a Creative Industry, critically examines craft’s position in the wider field of creative and cultural industries, drawing on case studies from the craft sectors of the UK and Australia. The book highlights the prevalence of discrimination and marginalisation in craft, connecting both to the cultural logics of capitalism and colonialism undergirding production generally. In exploring the more overtly equitable practices of community-based social craft enterprises and First Nations led craft organisations, Patel suggests that craft organisations grounded in the experiences, cultures and interests of marginalised peoples hold potential for a reconfiguration of our collective judgement of craft. The book argues that such a reconfiguration would necessarily prioritise the goals and experiences of makers in their craft practice at the same time that it considers the social context against which the craft object was produced. Useful as a reorientation of political priorities, Patel’s framework recentres underrepresented and marginalised craftspeople and their communities in assessing and envisioning craft. A useful intervention in craft culture and policy, the framework does not necessarily consider pathways toward collectively challenging the underlying relations of capitalist and colonial oppression and exploitation, something that would require the intentional crafting of movements of intersectional solidarity and resistance.