We are pleased to announce the appointment of Prof. Dr. Sarah Kettley and Prof. Dr. Ullrich Kockel as the Editors-in-Chief of Crafts (ISSN: 3042-8718).

Prof. Dr. Sarah Kettley is Chair of Material and Design Innovation at Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh where she is also the co-convenor of the Edinburgh Futures Institute research cluster in Creative Health and Technology.

She completed her PhD in computer science at Edinburgh Napier University in 2007, titled “Crafting the Wearable Computer”, it dealt with the nature of craft in the development and experience of digital jewellery. Her areas of interest include research-through-design, craft as methodology, wearable technologies, theory and methodology development, anthropologies of craft and design, and relational models of participatory design and care.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, a founder member of the international practice-research-friendly Arcintex research network, and between 2017 and 2025 co-chaired the RAFT research group at Edinburgh College of Art.

Prof. Dr. Ullrich Kockel is Professor of creative ethnology at the Institute for Northern Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands and a Visiting Professor at the Latvian Academy of Culture, Rīga and Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. Following PhD research on regional development at the University of Liverpool, he held teaching and research positions in several humanities and social science disciplines in Britain, Germany and both parts of Ireland from the mid-1980s.

Throughout the 1990s, while based in Liverpool, he worked closely with the European Centre for Traditional and Regional Cultures. Since 2000, he has held chairs in European Studies (West of England), European Ethnology and Folklife (Ulster), and Cultural Ecology and Sustainability (Heriot-Watt). His research ranges across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, with special focus on traditional crafts, especially basketry, place-lore and place-making, and community resilience and sustainability.

He was elected to the United Kingdom’s Academy of Social Sciences in 2003, and the Royal Irish Academy in 2012. During his time as President of SIEF, the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (2008-13), he established the SIEF Working Group on Place Wisdom, and from 2007 to 2018 he was Editor-In-Chief of the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures.