What if craft is not the lesser twin of art, but another theory of making, one in which the hand thinks, the material answers, and form emerges through a dialogue with earth, fibre, clay, metal, wood, stone, pigment, or thread? What if the translator is not a mere carrier but a craftsperson, whose hands weaves culture, sound, meaning and memory? Is craft merely an act of mechanical repetition, or is it a profound performance of material translation? Is translation a routine reproduction or a craftsperson of cultural artefacts? This seminar proposes a critical intervention at the intersection of Craft Studies and Translation Studies, challenging the long-standing disciplinary hierarchies that have placed both craftsperson and translator to the margins of arts and aesthetics. It asks whether handicraft, far from being reducible to reproduction, may be understood as an act of transformation: a poetics of touch in which no object is merely duplicated, because every gesture, grain, pressure, fracture, and finish produces a new event of sense. Such questions also open a broader comparative inquiry into translation itself, long treated in many traditions as secondary to authorship, even though translation too is an act of invention and recreation rather than mechanical equivalence. We therefore ask: why are authors and artists immortalised as divine creators, while translators and artisans remain forced into anonymity, stripped of signatures, and systematically exploited within global market economies?

We invite papers that interrogate thinking back through hands as an epistemological and creative act. If no two handmade objects and no two translations are ever truly identical, can handicraft and translation ever be dismissed as a mere copy? We invite papers that trace the historical entanglement of craft and translation from preindustrial artisanal cultures to the transformations brought by industrial capitalism, mechanisation, and digital automation. The history of translation shows long continuity from ancient interpretive practices to the printing press and machine translation, while AI intensifies anxieties about the displacement of human judgement. In a parallel trajectory, craft has been recast under industrial modernity as residual, decorative, or archaic, as well as mass production and automation have altered the status of manual skill and material intelligence.

Rather than asking whether craft is like translation or translation like craft, this seminar asks what each reveals about the other. And in an age when AI promises seamless conversion while threatening depth, tact, and opacity, what forms of human making remain irreducible, unautomatable, and ethically necessary? We seek papers that challenge the politics of secondary art, separation of art from craft, originality from repetition, and authorship from labour, and that imagine a comparative aesthetics of craftmaking and translating as thinking across languages, materials, and histories.