Professor Trevor Marchand - on craft, craftmanship and craftpeople

I have been keeping an eye on Professor Trevor Marchand’s on-going scholarship on learning a craft. While in Singapore a couple of weeks ago, I caught up on various publications archived on his webpage which includes videos summarising his work.

There is a video of his inaugural professorial lecture: The pursuit of pleasurable work: An anthropology of craft and craftspeople plus a shorter lecture discussing craft knowledge, learning and apprenticeship. The video of his inaugural lecture as a professor covers the work he undertook when he enrolled as a student of woodwork / furniture making. The shorter video summarises the focus of his work to date.

Some publications listed are available for download. Marchand's anthropological studies provides evidence of the socio-materiality and socio-cultural-political dimensions of craft work and of how apprenticeship learning contributes to the learning of crafts which often have scant verbal vocabulary to describe specific physical actions, approaches and problem solving strategies.