Diversity Initiatives and Addressing Inequalities in Craft

Abstract

The UK's creative industries workforce is dominated by the white and relatively privileged, and it appears the craft sector is no different. According to the Crafts Council, compared to the average profile of all occupations, craft workers are more likely to be male and white. The Crafts Council is attempting to support greater diversity in the UK craft sector through various schemes and research projects. This chapter reflects on one such project, a 2018 Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Creative Economy engagement scheme, which sought to provide social media skills training to women makers from black and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds in two UK cities: Birmingham and London. The workshops, facilitated by the author, investigated the specific challenges facing women makers of colour who wish to use social media for the benefit of their craft practice. These challenges centre on the volatile nature of social media platforms, where makers of colour are subject to disproportionate scrutiny. There are also concerns that social media skills gaps may block the pathway of contemporary craft micro-enterprise. The concept 'mutual aid' draws attention to the positive possibilities of social media for unblocking those pathways for makers of colour through mutual support and mobilisation.

Crafting professionals: Skills and resources for graduates entering the craft economy

“…The discussion on inequalities presented in this article therefore relates primarily to class, although graduates did not always explicitly articulate this as a class-based inequality. It is also acknowledged that the majority of participants were white -also reflecting craft degree demographics (Crafts Council, 2016) -and therefore experiences specific to ethnically diverse makers (Patel, 2020a) may not be fully represented in this study. Recent discussions and research acknowledging a lack of diversity and the presence of racism in craft, including in craft education (Patel, 2020c), are therefore used to contextualise discussion of how inequalities, particularly around the role of creative identity, may be exacerbated for ethnically diverse makers.…”

“…There has been growing interest in the transition of creative graduates from higher education (HE) to work and their ideal skillset (Bridgstock, 2011;Haukka, 2011), alongside investigations into new working patterns (Taylor and Luckman, 2020) and inequalities (Patel, 2020b) emerging for creatives, including craftspeople (Luckman and Andrew, 2020;Patel, 2020a). While craft careers are seemingly open to everyone under the wide spectrum of amateur and professional activity (Luckman, 2015), increased competition and precarious working conditions make craft (and other creative) careers challenging (Gill and Pratt, 2008;Taylor and Luckman, 2020), with higher barriers to entry for some groups than others (Brook et al, 2020).…”

Who counts, and is counted, in craft?

“…In their Introduction to this special issue on 'Craft Economies and Inequalities', the editors Karen Patel and Rajinder Dudrah acknowledge the important role of quantitatively informed research in revealing inequalities in access to creative sector employment. This research all too clearly makes visible what many of us can already see, namely that across the Global North creative employment is overwhelmingly dominated by people who are 'white and relatively privileged' (Patel and Dudrah, 2021), including in craft (Luckman, 2015;Luckman and Andrew, 2020;Patel, 2020aPatel, , 2020cPatel, , 2021. While the majority of my own research is qualitative, as someone examining cultural and creative employment it is difficult to completely avoid having to engage with (the limits of) statistics, especially when working with government, industry and community partners imprisoned in policy discourses that can overly privilege the so-called 'hard' evidence of numbers.…”

“…Recently, craft across the Global North has had something of its own reckoning with its exclusions, especially on the basis of race. While there had been practitioners and other voices championing diversity in craft and drawing attention to absences long before the Black Lives Matter movement's new levels of visibility and shared outrage in mid-2020 (Patel, 2020a(Patel, , 2020c, there is now a palpable and genuine desire evident among key craft gatekeepers to do better and be more inclusive in this space (Patel, 2020b). This includes redressing histories of what counts as recognised professional craft practice.…”

Crafting Professionals: craft higher education & sustainable business development

“…At the heart of this there is a supply and demand issue with the overall volume of creative graduates, but also problems with creative industries employment structures including unpaid internships and low-paid employment that may deter or prevent graduates from pursuing a creative career. These factors are likely to be exacerbated by the economic crisis associated with Covid-19 (Comunian and England, 2020) and have significant implications for supporting diversity in craft (Patel, 2020) and creative careers in general (Brook, O'Brien and Taylor, 2020).…”