Alternative Forms of Organizing in Craft Practices: Slowness, Commons, and Ethics

This paper explores craft as an alternative form of organizing that resists dominant capitalist logics of speed, efficiency, and extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and creative workshops conducted in the Swedish craft ecosystems of Dals Långed and Fengersfors, we examine how practices of slowness, commoning, and care materialize through situated engagements with tools, materials, spaces, and more-than-human actors. We argue that craftbased organizing enacts a relational and processual mode of resistance, grounded in seasonal rhythms, collective governance, and ecological attunement, realized through alternative modes of organizing. Methodologically, we mobilize creative workshops as ethico-political events that generate embodied and speculative insights into alternative organizational imaginaries. Our contribution is threefold: we empirically demonstrate how craft-making sustains post-industrial communities through forms of commons-based infrastructure; we conceptualize slowness as a world-making practice that reconfigures value and temporality; and we offer a methodological repertoire for researching alternative organizations beyond extractive paradigms. Ultimately, we position craft not as a nostalgic return but as a prefigurative practice, reimagining economic and social relations in times of ecological and political uncertainty.