About CRAFT: Community Renewal: Artificing Futures Transitions

Welcome to CRAFT - we hope you enjoy this experience of publishing from the practitioner’s perspective.  Together we can co-author our publication to become recognised among our peers.  If you wish you can host edit a theme.  CRAFT is designed as a Peer 2 Peer mentored and reviewed publishing platform. Please let us have your thoughts and ideas and suggestions for future editions.

Our Vision

Primarily our vision is one of a ‘practical hope’ through helping us as spectator/readers/digerati learn towards an embodied, thoughtful, critical, practical, empowered, interpersonal and experimental attitude. As such the opposite of the illusionary and environmentally destructive stance, we see even in our own back yards today with our dependent consumerism.

CRAFT’s theme, then is to publish work that is primarily visual and can provide practical hope, is innovative and developed within practice that is grounded. The focus of such critical practice is to include a significant ‘hands on’ component and include reprise and reflections thereon. Generally such praxis is based on a completed (exemplar) project. Each publication will have a theme1 around this focus potentially drawing on a range of engagement with CRAFT.

Our Themes

  1. CRAFTing Futures Nature can live with – through CRAFT – Community Renewal: Artificing Futures Transitions
  2. This e-zine/e-magazine seeks to link the humanities/social sciences with hard sciences through, ‘hands on’ projects and associated learning that demonstrate practically today that a better world is possible tomorrow for our children with planet
  3. To listen to and give a site for the silenced voices and invisible practices in a praxis of hope that can help our culture be sustainable
  4. Our principal aim is for readers/surfers/authors who are learned in the school of life/hard knocks/unschooled in the conventional sense so to speak yet deeply learned and practical yet with few if any degrees or training diplomas.
  5. Crafters connecting in a circle of practice and learning – a community of praxis
  6. To link with initiatives such as Transition Towns, PowerDown, Permaculture, Zero Emissions Living Economies etc.
  7. NB: The magazine is a PF & NFP – Public Domain and Not For Profit exercise

Our Costs

CRAFT is free to all with special offers to subscribers.  It is paid for in federal dollars and local currency (LETS) by the founders Paul Wildman and Jim Prentice with in kind web work by Dolph Cook.  We ask in return that you respect the authorship of the article and eZine and, like a good pizza, pass on the recommendation.  From time to time there may be ‘appropriate’ advertising which could generate some income.

Our History

The CRAFT ‘idea’ has been about 20 years in the making for Paul Wildman and has gone through various permutations and combinations before landing on CRAFT.  Essentially all of these p&c’s are about anchoring text inc. visually, in P2P experience not the other way round in a way that is intellectually rigorous and replicable – a community of practice so to speak from our ‘coauthoring’ readers.

Our Future

Our intent is to commit for a setup period of 3 mths then a proof of concept period of three years.  If CRAFT should prove successful then within this longer period we intend to set up a CRAFTy vignette series, provide avenues to promote industrial and other forms of CRAFT art, and provide a (a)venue for those interested in publishing eBooks etc. in the genre of CRAFT (please see list under ‘Our Vision’).


1 CRAFTwork viz. CRAFT’ing, CRAFT’er, and others: CRAFT’y vignettes, CRAFTy’learning, artyCRAFTy, CRAFT’work, CRAFT’techne, CRAFTe’Books, CRAFTy’life, greenCRAFT, handCRAFT, CRAFT’animation, CRAFTy’potlatch, sauvage’CRAFT’ing, bricoleur’CRAFT’er, airCRAFT, permaCRAFT, landCRAFT, seaCRAFT, musiCRAFT, bushCRAFT, volkCRAFTwerker, CRAFTartificer, museCRAFT, CRAFT(h)activism, physioCRAFT, bioCRAFT, memeoCRAFT, futureCRAFT, hyperCRAFT, CRAFTfutures, post-apocalypseCRAFT, CRAFTy’nomics and CRAFTzEine etc.

Discuss - 4 Comments

  1. Iona says:

    Spread the good news of CRAFT like butter to all relevant green sites, zines, bloggers; get the good word out.

  2. Debra Beattie says:

    Ooops – the website works (not wroks) well – not sure about me :)

Leave a Reply to Debra Beattie Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Note marked required (*) fields.

*