Artisanal Labor Research Articles

Computational reparations as generative justice: Decolonial transitions to unalienated circular value flow

The Latin roots of the word reparations are “re” (again) plus “parere” which means “to give birth to, bring into being, produce”. Together they mean “to make generative once again”. In this sense, the extraction processes that cause labor injustice, ecological devastation, and social degradation cannot be repaired by simply transferring money. Reparations need to take on the full sense of “restorative”: the transition to a decolonial system that can support value generators in the control of their own systems of production, protect the value they create from extraction, and circulate value in unalienated forms that benefit the human and non-human communities that produced that value. With funding from the National Science Foundation, we have developed a research framework for this process that starts with “artisanal labor”: employee-owned business and worker collectives that have people doing what they love, despite low incomes. Focusing primarily on Detroit's Black-owned urban farms, artisanal textile businesses, Black hair salons, worker collectives, and other community-based production, with additional connections to Indigenous and other communities, we have introduced digital fabrication technologies, sensors, artificial intelligence, server-side apps and other computational support for a transition to unalienated circular value flow. We will report on our investigations with the challenges at multiple scales. At each level, we show how computational supports can act as restorative mechanisms for lost circular value flows, and thus address both past and ongoing disenfranchisement.

COVID-19 and Artisan Labourers in Urban Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria: A Study on Resilience

This article examines the sociology of work in an unstable environment produced by COVID-19 with emphasis on sustenance of employment among urban artisan labourers in Owerri, Imo State. It interrogates the resilience of this occupational type in the face of such disruptive shock as COVID-19. it aims to understand the ways in which COVID-19 Pandemic has affected the ability of artisan labourers to secure employment and value for their labour. A sample of 180 respondents was randomly selected from six different artisan labour market locations for the study. Survey method was used since there is a need for data from the artisan workers themselves. The nonparametric methods of analysis namely; Spearman’s rank correlation was adopted to analyze collected data. Results show significant erosion of employment potentials with 50 percent reduction in number that had a 7-day work week, reduced work time, unaffected earning potentials, engagement with higher number of short-term contracts per capita, 50% reduction in number that never did short term work, conscription of greater number of household members and eroded buying power of compensation packages and sundry rewards for work. This shows that though Nigeria was not one of the most affected countries, it has, however experienced reverberations from the most affected countries. The results compel the advocacy that persons in the informal sector may have to benefit from government programmes for the formal sector such as pension schemes.

Robustness Analysis of Total Project Cost and Schedule Delay and Overrun Indicators of Heavy Industrial Projects

Barriers such as cost overruns and schedule delays make it challenging to achieve successful project outcomes. Their early detection, however, allows mitigation strategies to be implemented before too much delay has occurred; therefore, the objective of this study was to identify the total project cost and schedule overrun indicators and evaluate their reliability for large-scale heavy industrial projects. To accomplish the study’s goals, a structured survey was developed and disseminated to construction industry professionals to gain their input on the most important cost overrun indicators (COIs) and schedule overrun indicators (SOIs). The collected data were analyzed by applying various statistical tests, and a list of the significant COIs and SOIs was compiled utilizing all-possible regression. The extreme bound analysis (EBA) method was adopted to determine the robustness of the identified indicators. The results revealed the nine COIs are design phase contract type, change management approach, degree of internal stakeholders’ alignment, delay in the delivery of long-term facility machinery, proportion of artisanal labor sourced locally, proportion of design completion before the budget approval of the project, preparing for startup deployment, agreement including delayed completion charges, and number of design organizations; two of these were fragile indicators. The results also demonstrated the nine influential indicators for total schedule overrun are implementation of front-end planning, efficacy of the change management process, project population density, average number of project management (PM) team participants in the procurement phase, prior designer and contractor partnership, delay in the delivery of long-term facility machinery, average size of PM team design phase, efficacy of designers group interaction, and number of subcontracting firms; six of these were robustly related to the model. The findings of this study can help construction project decision makers focus on the most reliable indicators and reduce the number of revisions required throughout the execution of a project.

Addiction, Waste(d) Labor, and the Debate of the Carpenter's Tools

Addiction, Waste(d) Labor, and the <i>Debate of the Carpenter's Tools</i>

Automating the design-build-test-learn cycle towards next-generation bacterial cell factories

Automation is playing an increasingly significant role in synthetic biology. Groundbreaking technologies, developed over the past 20 years, have enormously accelerated the construction of efficient microbial cell factories. Integrating state-of-the-art tools (e.g. for genome engineering and analytical techniques) into the design-build-test-learn cycle (DBTLc) will shift the metabolic engineering paradigm from an almost artisanal labor towards a fully automated workflow. Here, we provide a perspective on how a fully automated DBTLc could be harnessed to construct the next-generation bacterial cell factories in a fast, high-throughput fashion. Innovative toolsets and approaches that pushed the boundaries in each segment of the cycle are reviewed to this end. We also present the most recent efforts on automation of the DBTLc, which heralds a fully autonomous pipeline for synthetic biology in the near future.

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

Labour, Incorporated: Dependent Contracting and Wageless Work in Africa’s “Responsible” Mines

This article examines the growing corporate reliance on artisanal labour in the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This shift from autonomous miners to corporate contractors, we suggest, holds historical significance and augurs a radical break with contemporary modes of extractive production. Under the banner of “responsible mining,” this form of dependent contracting fosters wageless relations in exchange for legal access to mining sites and corporate monopoly over artisanal production. By analysing the roots and mechanisms underlying these cooperative-corporate partnerships, we describe this emergent relation between labour and capital around three key features: the role of cooperatives as labour platforms, corporate control over local markets, and the deployment of discursive and technological regimes of responsibility and traceability.

Guild formation and the artisanal labour market: the example of Castelló d’Empúries, 1260–1310

ABSTRACT This article examines artisanal employment agreements from the Catalan town of Castelló d’Empúries from 1260–1310, the period before and just after the formation of the first craft guild in that town. It addresses why craft guilds formed and what advantage guilds offered medieval artisans in contrast to pre-guild systems, with a focus on the market for artisanal training. The pre-guild artisanal labour market in late thirteenth-century Castelló was highly flexible, with a variety of terms and contract types under which craft training could be acquired. Artisans were free to make any agreement they found mutually satisfactory, but they were also at the mercy of the market. Trained artisans were not always the ones with higher resources and power compared to prospective learners. The cloth-finishers’ guild of Castelló closely monitored the market for training in their craft, and standardised the terms and contract formats under which training was offered.

Le travail du maître imprimeur : La fabrication de la lithographie d'art en couleur dans la France Fin de siècle

In the final years of the nineteenth century, many avant-garde painters in Paris turned to lithography as a new medium through which to further their chromatic exploration. Lithography attracted artists because it did not require their command of the technical aspects of printmaking; they could draw on the stone or transfer paper and then leave the more complex steps to a professional, such as master printer Auguste Clot. Clot became an invaluable collaborator, performing the various labor-intensive steps required to produce color art lithographs, from preparation to final printing. This study examines the printer’s industrial training, manual labor, and technical expertise in color, the medium’s defining aesthetic and material element. The paper argues that the printer’s artisanal labor and crucial collaboration with artists proved essential for the elevation of original art color lithographs above their commercial counterparts.

Blake's debt: Artisanship and the future of labor

AbstractTaking as prerequisite Peter Frase's argument that the labor markets and living conditions of the twenty‐first century will be primarily determined by the dual “specters of ecological catastrophe and automation,” this article investigates William Blake's poetic response to the problems of religious and financial debt within the context of his own environmentally compromised era. It briefly historicizes the financial components of Blake's printmaking before turning to an examination of his illuminated books, which imagine a form of debt relief grounded in a millenarian theory of political intervention. While Blake's investment in artisanal labor reveals an aversion to technological reproducibility, his cyclical notion of an artificially constructed ecological future models a technologically hybrid ontology useful for addressing Frase's nexus of environmental destruction and mechanized production.

Remediating the Archive: Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Film Quilts as Forms of Material Knowledge

This article argues that the quilting works of Sabrina Gschwandtner, which sew archival 16 mm film strips into complex and colourful visual patterns, offer an understanding of film archives as embodied sites of historical, gendered, knowledge. As cinematic objects, Gschwandtner’s film quilts veer from and expand the conception of cinema as a projected medium, while the artisanal labour of sewing spatializes the process of editing, “lending [it] a concreteness” (Walley 2020, 327). The quilts, I argue, embody a form of archiveology, drawing on “archival material to produce knowledge about how history has been represented and how representations […] are actually historical in themselves and have anthropological value” (Russell 2018, 22). The historical knowledge of these objects is no longer transmitted didactically and orally (as in the found footage documentaries she uses), but rather through the very materiality of the quilting process. Gschwandtner’s artisanal work mirrors the gendered labour of film editors, while reflecting on the historical significance of quilts as carriers of information transmitted in gendered and racialised circles. I contend that the film quilts are sensory vectors of archival knowledge. While offering crucial considerations on the disregard of American institutions (and archives) towards feminized artisanal labour, Gschwandtner’s work also remediates these archival materials, calling attention to their deterioration as slowly decaying, sensory objects. This remediation allows me to consider archives as sites of sensorial interactions and constantly evolving historical and embodied knowledge.

Three-dimensional printing

The incessant exploration of technology in the segment of health care and medicine has paved a way to herald the dawn of three-dimensional (3D) and four-dimensional imaging technologies in dentistry. 3D printing also referred to as solid free-form fabrication is a form of rapid prototyping that utilizes additive manufacturing technology in contrast to the subtractive technique of commonly used imaging technology like CAD/CAM. 3D printing has materialized the fabrication of custom-made products that eliminates the exhaustive artisanal labor techniques with reduced work time. It also escalated the accuracy and precision in the production of intricate human details. The purpose of this review is to procure the data summarizing the applications of novel 3D printing technique in the field of pediatric dentistry harnessing enhancement in technology. Furthermore, it compiles data from various clinical trials providing evidence-based approach for promoting the implementation of the techniques into practice.

Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France by Paola Bertucci

Reviewed by: Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France by Paola Bertucci Sven Dupré (bio) Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France By Paola Bertucci. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 312. Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France By Paola Bertucci. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 312. This book explores the relationship between science, the mechanical arts, and the French state, from the founding of the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1666 until the first volumes of the Encyclopédie published in 1751. In her study, Paola Bertucci focuses on a largely forgotten society, the Societé des Arts, whose members advocated the notion that the improvement of the mechanical arts was essential for the economic prosperity and colonial expansion of the French state. Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment reveals the hidden relationship between the Encyclopédie and the projects of the Societé des Arts. Diderot (of the Encyclopédie) was inspired and indebted to numerous writings on the arts by Societé members. However, as Bertucci convincingly shows in the epilogue of her book, Diderot was also responsible for making this relationship invisible. By promoting the authors of the Encyclopédie to savants, he erased the political epistemology that the Societé members had articulated. This book therefore recovers what the Enlightenment looked like from the perspective of Societé des Arts members instead of the philosophes—the perspective which became dominant due to Diderot. Despite the book's title, the Societé des Arts's members did not consider themselves artisans; nor were they philosophes. The members' reaction to the increased interest in the mechanical arts from the side of the savants and the Académie Royale des Sciences was not to elevate the status of [End Page 956] artisanal labor or the perception of the artisan. Instead, they developed in their writings a strategy to differentiate themselves from mere artisans, proclaiming themselves to be artistes. The artiste, the central character of Bertucci's book, is the artisan with esprit. The theory of knowing that the artiste developed emphasized the role of the body and manual dexterity. Yet, it differed from the "artisanal epistemology" discussed by Pamela Smith in The Body of the Artisan (2004). The artistes did not argue for a way of knowing that was typical for all artisans, but on the contrary claimed that their epistemology differed from other practitioners of the arts. Bertucci touches upon the meaning of esprit and the distinctiveness of the artistes' epistemology, contrasting it with "artisans' subservience to rules… derived from the classical definition of art, and in particular of the mechanical arts, as techne" (p. 9). It would be interesting to survey artistes' writings on the language of ingenuity as recently scrutinized in Alexander Marr's and his colleagues' Logodaedalus (2019). Bertucci emphasizes the political dimension of this epistemology. Bertucci builds upon the substantial number of studies in the history of art, science, and technology devoted to writings on the arts that argue that writing is a political act. Her book is particularly good at articulating the various portrayals of artisans and their epistemologies throughout the diverse publication projects on the arts in old regime France. According to Gilles des Billettes (of a noble family and inventor of a hydraulic machine) and René de Réaumur (a physicist and elected member of the Académie des Sciences), artisans were not peers, and because of their secretive nature, they were even obstacles to writing a natural history of the arts. In Réaumur's view, Bertucci argues, there was no ingenuity either in their hands or in their minds. The Societé des Arts's concept of artisanal knowledge was radically different. It considered, unlike Réaumur, that the perfection of the arts would emerge in the artisans' very creation process, rather than through experimental knowledge gained in Réaumur's laboratory. Moreover, despite the artisans' secrecy, the Societé discovered and encouraged collaboration among artistes, and followed the model of the Republic of Letters. The artiste's useful knowledge, openly shared for the public good, consisted of "manual dexterity, knowledge of materials, as well as the ability to organize, maintain...

Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther by Mark Chinca

Reviewed by: Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther by Mark Chinca Barbara Newman Mark Chinca. Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther. Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xv, 299. 9 illus. $80.00. Philosophy, as Plato famously said, is meditation on death. The biblical author Jesus ben Sirach similarly wrote, “In all thy works remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin” (Sir 7:40). Mark Chinca’s careful study [End Page 294] traces select Christian attempts to obey that precept from the thirteenth century through the sixteenth, with a coda on Descartes. His method is partly rhetorical, partly psychological, as he parses the fine distinctions among various techniques for meditating. Beyond his specific focus on the four last things (death, judgment, hell, and heaven), Chinca examines modes of meditation per se as a devotional exercise. According to the jacket copy, meditating on death was an important premodern technique “for developing a sense of individual selfhood.” But Chinca’s work hardly bears out that claim if we take “individual selfhood” in its usual sense, for the goal of these devout meditations was in no way to cultivate or express one’s unique personality. It was rather to internalize universal truths so as to take personal responsibility for them. At one point Chinca devotes ten pages to the maxim “all humans are mortal,” showing how reiterated exempla impressed it on the believer’s soul. Modes of death vary, as in Leonard Cohen’s haunting Jewish meditation: “And who by fire, who by water,/Who in the sunshine, who in the night time,/Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,/Who in your merry merry month of May,/Who by very slow decay,/And who shall I say is calling?” But medieval treatises did not encourage speculation on how death might come. They insisted instead that it would come, making that certainty the touchstone of the believer’s approach to life. Chinca’s first chapter treats three influential texts by Bonaventure: De regimine animae, Soliloquium, and De triplici via. Although all three are in Latin, they adapt traditional monastic exercises for secular users. De triplici via introduces the familiar scheme of three spiritual “ways”: purgative, illuminative, and unitive. Concentrating on such terms as gradus and scala, Chinca argues that in the Benedictine Rule, the ladder of the soul’s progress with its rungs is a metaphor drawn from artisanal labor, since the monastery was conceived as a spiritual workshop. But in Bonaventure these terms become equivocal—sometimes metaphors, but sometimes technical terms for stages in a systematic scheme of meditation. Always methodical, Bonaventure directs the soul to turn its “ray of contemplation” in four directions—toward its interior, to see how it has been “formed by nature, deformed by sin, and reformed by grace” (60); toward external things to learn contemptus mundi; toward what is below it to attain fear of death, judgment, and hell; and finally toward what is above it to cultivate longing for celestial joy. Within each of these contemplations, the Soliloquium provides detailed points and images for the exercitant to ponder, in a program meant to be repeated frequently to enhance its transformative power. [End Page 295] Chapter 2 deals with the Somme le Roi, a handbook compiled by the Dominican Friar Laurent for King Philip III of France in 1279. Though not original with this author, the Somme le Roi outpaced many comparable works. Its ars moriendi chapters were continually copied for two centuries, making their way into print and multiple translations. The work sends its reader on an imaginative journey: “go out of yourself, go out of this world, learn to die, separate your soul from your body in thought. Send your heart into the other world—that is, into heaven, hell, and purgatory” (66). Dante took that journey, as did many visionaries. But the purpose of the exercise is less to create vivid pictures of the afterlife than to keep death before the mind’s eye at all times. The believer should “learn to die” not like the worldly wise...

From the Editors

From the Editors John Bauer, Christina Dando, and Michael Wise We are pleased to present the forty-ninth volume of Historical Geography, our fourth published with the University of Nebraska Press. As ever, our thanks go to our contributors, reviewers, and the members of our editorial board, as well as our colleagues at the Press and at the Historical Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. This volume features three research articles and twenty-two book reviews from scholars on five continents. The first article discusses the impact and legacy of Andrew Clark's classic The Invasion of New Zealand by Peoples, Plants, and Animals through analysis of book reviews and other appraisals of the work by historical geographers over the last half century. Ben Schuster's "Aerial Vision and Violence: The Beginning of Aerial Photography in Colombia (1920s)" shifts our attention to the early history of aerial photography and the Colombian state's use of the new technology for marking its national boundaries and for demographic surveillance, particularly of its Native communities. Finally, James Smith's "German Immigrant Labor in Baltimore on the Eve of the Civil War" attends to the roles played by ethnic communities in urban transitions associated with the shift from artisanal labor to industrialized mass production. We would like to express our gratitude in this volume to Briony McDonagh, who rotated off our editorial team earlier this year. McDonagh joined Historical Geography as coeditor in 2017, and her accomplishments included the recruitment of high-quality research articles and special issues produced by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. Her vision to make Historical Geography representative of a more diverse and interdisciplinary set of approaches is another of her contributions that will continue to animate the work of our journal as we move forward. [End Page ix] As ever, we welcome new submissions to the journal. Information for potential authors is available on our Project Muse webpage (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738) as well as our University of Nebraska Press portal (https://nebraskapressjournals.unl.edu/journal/historical-geography/). We also encourage informal inquiries to our editorial team about potential articles and special issues that engage the field of historical geography defined in the broadest possible sense. John Bauer, Christina Dando, and Michael Wise, coeditors [End Page x] Copyright © 2023 Historical Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers

Neoliberal Turns in Global Humanitarian Governance

In this article we seek to extend recent debates on how the promotion of self-reliance through vocational training and entrepreneurship has become the new neoliberal mantra among refugee-supporting agencies, policymakers and humanitarian actors. More specifically, we do so in the context of corporate and celebrity-endorsed humanitarian partnerships and initiatives that single out refugee women and girls. Informed by postcolonial feminist scholarship and guided by Carol Bacchi’s ‘what is the problem represented to be’ (WPR) approach we compare IKEA’s partnership with the Jordan River Foundation (JRF) in Jordan and Angelina Jolie’s support for the RefuSHE project in Kenya. While differences between the two problem representations exist, both initiatives seek to empower refugee women by activating latent entrepreneurial abilities. These, we conclude, reinforce a saviour/saved humanitarian logic while also obscuring the gender division of responsibilities and precarious nature of artisanal labour.

Building trust, mobilizing security: The making and selling of armoured cars in Guatemala City

Dozens of boutique auto shops in Guatemala City fortify cars against varying levels of threat, from 9 mm pistols to military grade assault rifles. Mechanics line windows, wheels, and even skylights with bulletproof materials, promising an almost impenetrable vehicle amid a decidedly violent Central American city. In response to this growing confidence not just in Kevlar but also the intimacy of artisanal labour, this paper engages the culture of armoured cars to open an ethnographic window into the construction of trust amid a social context rife with urban violence, political corruption and economic inequality. As extended fieldwork evidences, mobile fortification reorients social relationships towards the imperative to trust – auto shop owners, mechanics and even the cars themselves – while also expanding the footprint of those who supposedly occupy the wrong side of a security wall.

The seduction of craft: Making and value in artisanal labour

Drawing on fieldwork amongst lacemakers in Slovakia, this article examines the relationship between practices of making and the production of value in artisanal labour. The author shows that the processes of making challenged artisans’ perceptions of the natural distribution of agency between humans and objects, resulting in feelings of ontological insecurity. Arguing that they perceived this insecurity as a problem of ethics, as well as a problem of agency, she demonstrates how the intellectual and sensual experience of manufacture was constitutive of the ways in which artisans perceived the value of their craftwork. Taking this approach, the article seeks to disrupt the anthropological habit of framing questions about value in terms of domestic economies, global markets and aesthetic regimes, and making in terms of skilled practice, embodied knowledge and knowledge transmission. The author also suggests that scholars ought to pay more attention to the ways in which ethical considerations are grounded in our ontological disposition towards the material world.

Acting Through Inaction: The Distinction Between Leisure and Reverie in Jacques Rancière’s Conception of Emancipation

The classical distinction between leisure and work is often used to define features of the emancipated life. In Aristotle leisure is defined as time devoted to purposeful activity, and distinguished from the labour time expended merely to produce life’s necessities. In critical theory, this classical distinction has been adapted to provide an image of emancipated life, as purposively driven, fulfilling and meaningful activity. Aspects of this adapted definition undermine the classical leisure/work distinction to the extent that the demand for meaningful work, i.e., a leisure-work conjunction, is now used as a critical perspective on unfulfilling, oppressive labour. Rancière, however, is critical both of this idea of an extended franchise for leisure and of its dependence on craft and artisanal labour as the model of satisfying, skilled work. Instead of Aristotelian leisure, or ‘fulfilling’ work, Rancière identifies in the state of reverie an alternative marker for the emancipated life. The theme is consistent across the scattered archival, historiographical, philosophical, literary and aesthetic contexts his writing treats. But since reverie is defined as disengagement from action, the position raises a number of difficulties. This article examines how Rancière connects reverie to emancipation. It focuses on two questions: the nature of the relation between his definition of reverie and the classical, Aristotelian concept of action; and, whether, given the constitutive non-relation between reverie and action that he outlines, Rancière’s position can address the persistent problem in critical theory of the motivation for the emancipated life. It is argued that his highlighting of the potential communicative significance of modes and scenes of emancipated life is relevant to this problem. The key argument is that rather than developing a ‘theory’, his approach to emancipation focuses on and values communicable experiences of emancipation, and that states of reverie are one such type of valued experience.

Automation for the artisanal economy: enhancing the economic and environmental sustainability of crafting professions with human–machine collaboration

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to eliminate millions of jobs, from finance to truck driving. But artisanal products (e.g., handmade textiles) are valued precisely because of their human origins, and thus have some inherent “immunity” from AI job loss. At the same time, artisanal labor, combined with technology, could potentially help to democratize the economy, allowing independent, small-scale businesses to flourish. Could AI, robotics and related automation technologies enhance the economic viability and environmental sustainability of these beloved crafting professions, perhaps even expanding their niche to replace some job loss in other sectors? In this paper, we compare the problems created by the current mass production economy and potential solutions from an artisanal economy. In doing so, the paper details the possibilities of utilizing AI to support hybrid forms of human–machine production at the microscale; localized and sustainable value chains at the mesoscale; and networks of these localized and sustainable producers at the macroscale. In short, a wide range of automation technologies are potentially available for facilitating and empowering an artisanal economy. Ultimately, it is our hope that this paper will facilitate a discussion on a future vision for more “generative” economic forms in which labor value, ecological value and social value can circulate without extraction or alienation.