Craft practices are being looked to as something of an antidote to the stresses and pressures of modern living.
9 Aug 2018
Susan Luckman
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Visual Arts
At a time when many of us feel overwhelmed by the 24/7 demands of the digital world, craft practices, alongside other activities such as colouring books for grown-ups and the up-surge of interest in cooking from scratch and productive home gardens, are being looked to as something of an antidote to the stresses and pressures of modern living.
Crafts such as knitting, crochet, weaving, ceramics, needlework and woodwork focus on repetitive actions and a skill level that can always be improved upon. According to the famous psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi this allows us to enter a “flow” state, a perfect immersive state of balance between skill and challenge.
Susan Luckman is Professor: Cultural Studies in the School of Creative Industries and Research Director, Creative Work Mobilities Research Node, Hawke EU Centre. She is also Cheney Fellow at the University of Leeds, 2017-2018.
Susan is an interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar whose work is concerned with the intersections of culture, place and creativity. Her research explores these relationships in relation to work in the cultural and creative industries, digital media, and grassroots innovation. She is currently Chief Investigator on a 4 year Australian Research Council Discovery Project 'Promoting the Making Self in the Creative Micro-economy’ which explores how online distribution is changing the environment for operating a creative micro-enterprise and, with it, the opportunities for mobile working lives and the impacts upon the larger relationship between public and private spheres this entails. She is also the leader of the 2017-2018 Erasmus+ Jean Monnet Project ‘Creative Industries and the Digital Economy as Drivers of EU Integration and Innovation’.
Susan is the author of Craft and the Creative Economy (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Locating Cultural Work: The Politics and Poetics of Rural, Regional and Remote Creativity (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), co-editor of The ‘New Normal’ of Working Lives: Critical Studies in Contemporary Work and Employment (Dynamics of Virtual Work Series, Palgrave 2018), Craft Economies (Bloomsbury 2018), Craft Communities (Bloomsbury 2019), and Sonic Synergies: Music, Identity, Technology and Community (Ashgate 2008), and author of numerous book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles and government reports on cultural work, creative industries and creative micro-entrepreneurialism.
