Call for papers for DHS online symposium ‘Crafting Furniture in the Global South: Contemporary Practices, Histories and Futures’
Furniture occupies a distinctive position at the intersection of craft, design, architecture, and everyday life. In regions across South and Southeast Asia and the wider Global South, furniture-making has long mediated relationships between local material cultures, artisanal knowledge systems, colonial and postcolonial histories, and global markets. Yet contemporary furniture design from these contexts remains underrepresented within dominant design history narratives, museum collections, and critical discourse.
This symposium, co-convened by Dr Rukmini Chaturvedi and the DHS, invites proposals that critically examine contemporary furniture design through the lens of craft, with particular attention to practices, objects, and discourses emerging from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the broader Global South. It seeks to foreground furniture as a site where questions of authorship, labour, material knowledge, identity, modernity, and global circulation are negotiated and contested.
Contributions are welcomed that interrogate how contemporary designers, craftspeople, studios, and manufacturers engage with craft traditions, whether through continuity, transformation, disruption, or strategic reinvention, and how these engagements are framed, mediated, and valued locally and internationally. The symposium aims to challenge Western-centric canons of furniture and design history by centring materially grounded, object-led, and decolonial approaches.
Further information about the symposium and proposal guidelines can be found on the DHS website.
The deadline for submitting papers is 9th March 2026.