This course explores how the current ideas of craft have emerged and changed from 1850 to the present. Students critically engage with comparative histories of craft across time & space & the importance of global perspectives is examined through scholarship well beyond such contexts as the Studio Craft or the Arts & Crafts movements. Seminar participants analyze the social, political, & environmental discourses of craft as they intersect with the cultures of skill, labor, & materials & consider; how we "read" and interpret objects of material culture, & what these objects tell us about the values of a society. GE: Oral and Written Communication