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MAKING FUTURES

The purpose of ‘Making Futures' is to improve understanding of the ways in which the contemporary crafts are practiced in relation to significant and new emerging agendas relating to global environmental and sustainability issues.

The objectives include trying to understand whether these ‘agendas’ offer opportunities for the crafts to redefine and reconstitute themselves as less marginalised, more centrally productive forces in society, through new formulations and/or re-articulations of practices, identities, positions and markets, in ways that might engage more closely with contemporary social and cultural needs.

‘Making Futures: the crafts in the context of emerging global sustainability agendas’ aims to bring together an international cast of academics, practitioners, curators, campaigners, activists, and representatives from associated organisations and agencies, to develop and explore the conference theme. The conference seeks to incorprate a diverse range of practice-based case studies with approaches rooted in historical and cultural modelling encompassing social, technological, critical-theoretical, and economic and political perspectives. Throughout, the intention will be to advance understanding and debate of this important area where practice and aesthetics confront contemporary social and political imepratives.

The conference invites submissions from practitioners, curators, historians, theorists, campaigners, activists, and representatives of public and private agencies with an interest in the relationship between the contemporary crafts and sustainability issues.

'Making Futures: the crafts in the context of emerging global sustainability agendas' will be held on Thursday 17th and Friday 18th September 2009 within the magnificently sited Mount Edgcumbe estate on the River Tamar opposite the city of Plymouth, Devon, UK.

To ensure the widest possible dissemination of its outcomes, all conference papers will be published as an open-access academic resource through the conference website. Plymouth College of Art will maintain this as long-term research resource.

Additionally, it is intended that a number of selected and revised papers will also be print published post-conference as a special thematic edition.