Session: Suspensions – Mobilizing Art and Aesthetics in Cultural Research

To talk about research in, on and through craft, art or design is a common way to describe three possibilities. By discussing some of the latest artistic research that has been developing in Swedish institutions in terms of these categories, I want to highlight some strains or hang ups or suspensions in which it leaves different researchers. I will take the field of Craft as my point of departure. Craftspeople doing research from within their professional fields, means for example doing research in craft, its materials and its methods. To do research in the same field but from an art historian’s or an ethnologist’s point of view usually means to do research on craft. To talk about research through craft could be to start by examining the processes of crafting relating it to corresponding perspectives and knowledges. But is this what the field has provided?