Crafty Impressions: The (New) Visual Culture of Contemporary Fibre Craft
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years in the Global North, there has been an extraordinary resurgence of craft. Do-it yourself and domestic fibre-based arts and crafts have proliferated in homes, workshops and online. The pandemic has further extended these developments. Today, craft is practiced for its physical slowness, intrinsic rewards, creative expression and psychological benefits. Craft is also pursued as a form of paid work. This is particularly true for a growing number of middle-class,white women in Canada and the United States. Increasingly, many craft workers are turning to visual and digital mediums, such as photography, video, blogging and social media, in an effort to showcase their work, exchange creative and technical ideas, cultivate communities, and generate business opportunities. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach and focusing on the hand-knitting industry in Canada and the United States, this dissertation explores the ways in which photographs circulated on social media platforms are bound up in the creative and labour practices, subjectivities, bodies, affects and politics of particular craft workers. The research suggests as craft workers use visual and digital media for the purposes of cultivating creativity, income, communities and political solidarity, they are simultaneously caught up in broader\ntechno-capitalist systems of power.These systems can create opportunities and pathways; they can also limit capacity to earn a secure and stable living, encourage the governing and surveillance of creativity, bodies and emotions, and facilitate the marginalization of transformative politics. Highlighting the ways in which the visual and material are not separate but conjoined, the case of the hand-knitting industry demonstrates how images circulated on social media platforms are bound up in networks of power that span across geography and time, and have important human, social, political and economic contexts and consequences. Adding empirical analysis to the ways in which images circulated on social media platforms do not just show things, but do things (Tolia-Kelly and Rose, 2012), this dissertation offers new perspectives on, and contributes to broader conversations about, visual culture, creative labour, platform economies and social justice, providing analysis on the interconnectedness of these systems, and how they relate to life both online and offline.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.073 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".