What Survives When Craft Loses its Conditions? Material Absence and Dwelling-With in Jingdezhen, a seminar by Dr Yihan Liu (University of Liverpool)

What Survives When Craft Loses its Conditions? Material Absence and Dwelling-With in Jingdezhen

By Dr Yihan Liu from the University of Liverpool

Abstract

What survives when craft loses its conditions? This paper explores this question through fourteen centuries of porcelain production in Jingdezhen, China, where craft persisted not by preserving an intact tradition, but by repeatedly remaking itself in landscapes already altered by its own history. Drawing on historical document analysis, the paper traces episodes of resource exhaustion, technological substitution, labour dispersal and abandoned industrial infrastructure. Extending organisational hauntology, it conceptualises the enduring consequences of these transformations as material absence: what remains organisationally consequential after the materials, relations or arrangements that once sustained production have disappeared. Dwelling-with names the practical work through which successive generations made such altered conditions workable again. Three findings emerge. First, continuity was produced through loss rather than despite it: production survived by reorganising around what could no longer be restored. Second, sensemaking was materially enacted: artisans worked out what new conditions would permit through experimentation, observation and correspondence with clay, fire, tools and one another, without necessarily recovering the histories that had produced those conditions. Third, skill resided in recombination: its value lay not only in performing specialised tasks, but in recalibrating relations among people, materials, technologies and inherited infrastructures. The Jingdezhen case unsettles familiar accounts of resilience, craft preservation and technological substitution by showing what persists is not necessarily the craft itself, but the capacity to make practice possible. The paper closes by asking what this history might reveal about human skill in an age of automation and digital change—particularly when the question is not simply what technology replaces, but what must be reorganised after it does.

About the speaker

Dr Yihan Liu is a Senior Lecturer in Work, Organisation, and Management at the University of Liverpool Management School, where she has been a faculty member since September 2018. With a strong background in critical organisation studies, Dr Liu brings a distinctive interdisciplinary lens to her teaching and research, drawing on insights from sociology, history, and ethics to examine how organisations operate within complex and evolving social, spatial, and technological environments. She holds a PhD in Organisation Studies and Management from Royal Holloway, University of London, where she developed her expertise in qualitative research methods, historical analysis, and the study of organisational space and identity.

At Liverpool, Dr Liu plays an active role in both teaching and research supervision. She teaches on Organisation Theory, Leadership, HRM and mentors postgraduate students at taught and research levels, supporting projects that range from workplace transformation and leadership ethics to the implications of AI in HRM. Her work offers critical insights into how organisations navigate uncertainty, construct legitimacy, and respond to pressing societal challenges such as climate change and digital disruption.