This research concentrates on an essential part of India’s creative economy: the traditional handicrafts sector. It will examine sustainability and sustainable practices related to environment and labour in traditional handicrafts and textiles with an aim to address inequalities from an intersectional perspective and to evaluate how and to what extent traditional practices can be embedded into the creative economy to ensure long-term environmentally and culturally sustainable and socially equitable development.
The project will use an ethnographically led mixed methods approach, employing interviews, surveys, and observations. It will involve a non-extractive, ethical and reciprocal process among diverse groups, thus addressing the current and future state of the creative economy from diverse viewpoints.
In light of India’s burgeoning creative economy, as well as a growing policy landscape in relation to crafts and textiles, urgent attention needs to be paid to how the sector is bringing forth regional economic revitalisation and the sustainable practices and their wider implicationon labour practices, with a particular attention on wellbeing and intersectional emphasis on gender, caste, religion, and class. Our aim in this project is to investigate traditional and (trans)local crafts and textiles in Delhi, Mumbai and Kohima.
Objective 1: explore sustainability and sustainable practices in local/traditional crafts and textiles in three Indian cities.
Objective 2: examine the transnational opportunities for partnership and trade involving sustainable practices with the Indian diasporic market in the UK.
Objective 3: investigate and develop a plan to tackle inequalities of gender, religion, and caste in the crafts and textiles sectors from an intersectional perspective.
Objective 4: train field researchers and community groups with techniques and methods of analysis and include them as authors inforthcoming publications thereby building research capacity and experience.
Objective 5: formulate policy recommendations for environmental and socio-cultural sustainability of the sector and wellbeing of artisans.
