Academic Writing & Presentations
2014-present
I've been out of academia proper since 2017, but I'm a researcher-at-heart. Below are anthology contributions and presentations at conferences. I'm interested in contributing to volumes on craft, critical theory, and rural art and organizing.
Toward a Digital-Handicraft Practice
Co-authored with Theresa Slater, Peter Lang, 2020.
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"Mary Callahan Baumstark and Theresa Slater meditate on this commingled interaction of new media by teasing out the traditions of hand-craft with digital-handmade practice. In their chapter “Toward A Practice of Digital-Handicraft,” Baumstark and Slater assert craft is a position, rather than a set of practices or materials, developed through tacit feedback. Their chapter explores interaction techniques for touch, including touchless interface and single or multiple finger techniques and how these gestures foster collaborative critical making and practices, particularly between the discourses of the digital and handmade.
Positioning handmade-digital practice as historically based in craft and new media theory, with wide-reaching implications for the emergence of digital practices within handmade traditions, a conceptual framework is presented for expanding and complicating the relationships between handmade and digital discourses. These relationships between the digital and handmade assert an awareness of the physical nature of digital technologies eschewing our conceptual relationships between code and plastic bodies."
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-Introduction
Social Utopia: Craft and Progress
Makers, Crafters, Educators: Working for Cultural Change, Routledge Publishing, 2019.
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Makers, Crafters, Educators brings the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos of maker and crafter movements into educational environments, and examines the politics of cultural change that undergird them. Addressing making and crafting in relation to community and schooling practices, culture, and place, this edited collection positions making as an agent of change in education. In the volume’s five sections—Play and Hacking, Access and Equity, Interdependence and Interdisciplinarity, Cultural and Environmental Sustainability, and Labor and Leisure—authors from around the world present a collage of issues and practices connecting object making, participatory culture, and socio-cultural transformation. Offering gateways into cultural practices from six continents, this volume explores the participatory culture of maker and crafter spaces in education and reveals how community sites hold the promise of such socio-cultural transformation.
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Other Presentations
2016-2020
“What a Steal! Theft in Contemporary Art,” co-lecture with Clint Loomis, Lewistown Art Center, Lewistown, MT, 2023.
“Toward a Practice of Digital Handicraft,” panel presentation with Theresa Slater, the 14th International Conference on Art in Society, Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.
“Craftivism and White Feminism” lecture in conjunction with HeavyShine (Guest Curator) The Front Gallery, New Orleans, 2019, https://vimeo.com/338269603
Closing Remarks with Professor Marcus Young, Cross-Pollination, a Socially Engaged Craft Conference, Minneapolis, MN, 2019.
“Craft and Technology” Instagram Live Lecture, in conjunction with Femynynytees, Montreal, QB/Lewistown, MT, 2018.
“Craftivism: From Historic Movement to Contemporary Method,” College Art Association Conference, Los Angeles, CA, 2018.
Roundtable Presentation, Canadian Craft Biennial, Burlington, ON, 2017. “What Can Be in the World: Roberto Lugo’s “Ghetto Pottery” and the Aesthetics of Luxury in Activism,” Nouveau Reach: Past, Present, and Futures, Toronto, Ontario, 2017.
“Ceramic Craftivism: Resistance and Activism in Contemporary Clay,” National Conference for Education in the Ceramic Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, 2017.
“Popular Potters: Neo-Modernism in Vogue and the New York Times,” #trending: mobilizing art and culture, Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Art Histories Graduate Conference, Toronto, ON 2016.
“Crafting Community: Craftivism in Ceramics,” Art + Design for Social Justice Exchange, Toronto, ON, 2014.