Between Lace and Labour : interview with Dr Nicolette Makovicky

english

2026

volume 4, issue 2

crafts   ethnography of handicrafts   labour   lacemaking

Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska fakulteta (Oddelek za etnologijo in kulturno antropologijo)
(Obvezni izvod spletne publikacije)

Nicolette Makovicky holds a PhD in Anthropology and is Associate Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, joining in 2010 after a three-year Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. Trained in European Ethnology (Copenhagen) and Anthropology (UCL), she conducted fieldwork amongst lacemakers in rural Central Slovakia for her PhD, and later amongst lacemakers in Koniaków in Southern Poland. Social and material relationships in fieldwork relationships led her to consider the economic, historical, and political embeddedness of craft labour. She writes mostly about gender, labour, ethics and morality, informal economy, and entrepreneurialism through the lens of vernacular crafts in Slovakia and Poland, where she has carried out long-term fieldwork since 2004. The motivation for the interview was her participation at last year’s international symposium Hands-on Ethnographies: Production and Meaning of (Contemporary) Handicrafts at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (organised by the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology), where she presented her recent research on the process of commoning, the role of gender, and the political economy of the production and sale of lace in the village of Koniaków, Poland.

23.07.2026