The artisanal imaginaries of contemporary production

Abstract

Ideas of “craft” and “craftsmanship” have long been mobilized in middle-class Global North markets to promote the romanticized authenticity of artisanal goods, but what happens when these ideas are applied to industrially-made products? This article analyzes the artisanal imaginaries of the Australian Made Campaign to explore how the campaign taps into the growing cultural desirability of the handmade and the artisanal, and heightened concerns about the future sustainability of mass production. Focusing on the discursive and aesthetic approach of the campaign’s Facebook posts, we show how the campaign contributes to a wider mainstreaming of neo-craft as a dominant mode for promoting production in a national context where onshore manufacturing has long been in decline. We argue that the campaign’s media repertoires work to “domesticate” large-scale manufacturing via emotive appeals to traditional artisanal tropes (“love,” “family,” “care”) to tap into the zeitgeist appeal of locally-specific and knowable scales of production.