With full apologies for the receipt of cross-posts
PLYMOUTH COLLEGE OF ART ANNOUNCES:
SECOND CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
FOR ACADEMIC PAPERS AND PRACTICE-LED CASE STUDIES
MAKING FUTURES
THE CRAFTS AS CHANGE-MAKER IN SUSTAINABLY AWARE CULTURES
WEBSITE AT: http:makingfutures.plymouthart.ac.uk (
mailto:[log in to unmask] )
Making Futureswill be held on Thursday 15th and Friday 16th September
2011 at Dartington Hall on the inspiring Dartington Estate, Devon, UK.
This is the 2ND CALL FOR ABSTRACTS. The closing date for receipt of
abstracts is 1st May 2011. (A 3rd and final call will appear in March).

 Making Futuresinvites submissions from craft practitioners, curators,
historians, theorists, campaigners, activists, and representatives from
public and private agencies with an interest in the relationship between
the contemporary crafts and sustainability issues. 
 CONFERENCE AIMS:
 Making Futures is about agency, change and the search for new grounds
and understandings, of the ways in which the contemporary crafts are
practiced in relation to new developing agendas relating to global
environmental and sustainability issues. 
The conference explores the idea that these emerging agendasinterrupt
and restage the possibilities of craft in fundamental ways that are
important to makers, their audiences, and to society more generally;
that these agendas present opportunities to redefine and reconstitute
the crafts as less marginalised, more centrally productive forces in
society, through new formulations and/or re-articulations of practices,
identities, positions and markets.
As was made evident through the first conference in 2009, a lively and
significant sustainability and ethical practice debate is taking place
within craft practitioner circles, supported by a wide range of
practice-based initiatives which are striving to re-articulate and
re-formulate craft practices, identities and audiences. These efforts,
de-facto, represent a level of micro-political engagement that modestly,
yet fundamentally, operate as change-makers - literally making the
future - and whose wider horizons are potentially charged with global
significance.
In this respect Making Futuresnot only explores crafts shifting
practices and meanings in the context of environmental sustainability,
but the ways in which craft, itself, becomes a methodologicalframe
through which to think through a wider set of socio-economic and
cultural factors.
 CONFERENCE SCOPE:
Making Futures invites submissions from across the full spectrum of
crafts practice. The scope is international and we welcome accounts from
non-western contexts, especially those experiencing rapid industrial and
urban development and newly expanding consumer markets. In terms of
presentation formats we will accept appropriate practice-led case
studies and historical and theoretical papers.
Proposals might address processes of making, technological, aesthetic,
critical-theoretical, economic and political, and/or pedagogic
perspectives. In addition, we invite explorations of two new significant
themes that emerged as concerns during the first conference: 
Craft as Social Processwill investigate craft not simply as a skilled
set of practices deployed to create artefacts, but as an agent in social
sustainability and a construct forged iteratively (or interactively)
between sets of practices, materials and communities or social groups. 
Craft in an Expanded Fieldwill explore how areas of ‘craft’ beyond the
Studio Crafts and Applied Arts might present, or narrate, the idea of
craft to the world; how they might challenge, extend, or be brought into
productive association with, the Studio Crafts and Applied Arts, while
also addressing our broader sustainability and/or ethical practice
concerns.
 FOR FULL DETAILS PLEASE VISIT THE CONFERENCE WEBSITE AT: 
http:makingfutures.plymouthart.ac.uk (
mailto:[log in to unmask] ) 
For all enquiries, contact: [log in to unmask] 

Please circulate 
this call as appropriate.
$$ DISCLAIMER-  Any opinions expressed in this email are those of the individual and not necessarily of Plymouth College of Art.

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