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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how traditional craft-knowledge and artisanal education generate varied aspirations, strategies and agentive capacities among handloom weavers by drawing from ethnographic fieldwork done in India among women weavers from the Ansari community.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how traditional craft knowledge and artisanal education generates varied agentive capacities among women handloom weavers. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork done with women weavers from the Ansari community in Western India, the paper critically looks at the dominant frameworks used to conceptualize agency, especially in the context of the informal sector. The informal sector is fluid and contains diverse strategies used by marginalized communities to respond to precarity and sustain livelihoods. I study ways in which artisans develop embodied and collective agency that does not necessarily fall within the neo-liberal feminist discourses and frameworks that imply agency as resistance to domination. Craft knowledge is not just technical skills and linear process-based knowledge but also social knowledge. The craft is the community in that sense. The knowledge and craft practice maintains hierarchies, organizes the community, and becomes a way through which women regulate, control and locate themselves and become participants. Women weavers become docile agents who use the very structure and their own subjectification to build capacity for action and change. The agentive capacity then is understood in ways in which they inhabit the norms and not just in acts of resistance. Agency here is embedded in temporal relational contexts and give rise to certain kinds of aspirations and open up new imaginaries of work.