Craft as More-Than-Human

Abstract

This article considers craft science and practice-led research in light of more-than-human approaches to practice under the heading posthumanism, as found within humanities and social sciences in recent years. Practice-led research within craft science, represents a vital and ground-breaking field of inquiry, as an embodied subjective field of examination with an impressive ability to gain deep knowledge of various forms of skilled and/or natural practices. One aspect of practice that this research seems less able to grasp, is a broader practical connection between multiple ontologies of human and non-human practice. Going beyond a purely human phenomenology of craft, this article seeks a more symmetrical and post-anthropocentric approach to knowledge and materiality, as practice in multiple ontologies. This would mean a shift in how craft science view practice, from being a strictly operational aspect adhering to human practitioners, to practice as an ongoing more-than-human process by which phenomena (and practitioners) are brought into being and are maintained.