The artisanal imaginaries of contemporary production
Date
2025
Authors
Phillipov, M.
Luckman, S.
McGaurr, L.
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Journal article
Citation
Journal of Communication, 2025
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Michelle Phillipov, Susan Luckman, Lyn McGaurr
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Abstract
Ideas of “craft” and “craftsmanship” have long been mobilized in middle-class Global North markets to promote the romanticized authenticity of artisanal goods, but what happens when these ideas are applied to industrially-made products? This article analyzes the artisanal imaginaries of the Australian Made Campaign to explore how the campaign taps into the growing cultural desirability of the handmade and the artisanal, and heightened concerns about the future sustainability of mass production. Focusing on the discursive and aesthetic approach of the campaign’s Facebook posts, we show how the campaign contributes to a wider mainstreaming of neo-craft as a dominant mode for promoting production in a national context where onshore manufacturing has long been in decline. We argue that the campaign’s media repertoires work to “domesticate” large-scale manufacturing via emotive appeals to traditional artisanal tropes (“love,” “family,” “care”) to tap into the zeitgeist appeal of locally-specific and knowable scales of production.
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Published: 25 June 2025.
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© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.