EDITED BOOK COLLECTIONS
Stein JA & Carr, C (eds), Designing through Planetary Breakdown: Locating Material Knowledge and Practical Skill. Routledge, June 2025.
This is an agenda-setting book that explores the many ways in which design labor is contributing to struggles for realizing post-carbon futures. … Designing Through Planetary Breakdown makes a major contribution to emerging discussion between design studies and design practice, the critical social sciences and environmental and climate studies.
– Professor Damian White, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
C. Carr and J.A. Stein (eds) 2025. Working through Planetary Breakdown: Labour, Skill and the Changing Climate. Routledge, 2025.
Climate change is reorganising work from the scale of “the economy” to “the body” and everything in between. Yet what these intersecting changes mean in practice for workers and communities requires diving into the minutiae of the array of occupations, places and visions already beginning to re-characterise the work landscape. In Working through Planetary Breakdown, Carr and Stein assemble 11 beautifully written chapters into a compelling collection that illuminates the informal as well as formal reskilling, rethinking and reimagining involved in work-based climate action. It is exactly the sort of peek under the hood that is needed to accelerate the just transition and climate change adaptation.
– Professor Lauren Rickards, Director, La Trobe Climate Change Adaptation Lab
SOLE AUTHORED MONOGRAPHS
Jesse Adams Stein, Industrial Craft in Australia: Oral Histories of Creativity & Survival (Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave Studies in Oral History series), 2021.*
Stein’s Industrial Craft in Australia is an incredibly important and timely book … and should be required reading for any politician serious about the future of manufacturing industry and a national skills base.
— Tim Strangleman, University of Kent, UK
This tightly argued, incredibly rich text should be read not just by labour scholars and activists, but also by progressive politicians and citizens. The themes it raises echo back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution and show that deskilling and the alienation of labour are still with us.
– John Tully (review in Labour / Le Travail
This is a major addition to craft studies, and will serve as a model for scholars in other geographies to follow.
— Glenn Adamson, author of Craft: An American History (2021)
This book represents a remarkable original contribution to the global study of deindustrialization and oral history more generally.
— Steven High, Concordia University, Canada
Jesse Adams Stein, Hot Metal: Material Culture & Tangible Labour, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2016.*
Hot Metal shows us how labour history can lead the way that history is written. In that, it is pathbreaking and important. This a terrific story. It is a critical reflection on the mistakes of economic rationalism … without becoming only a story of loss with nostalgia for a golden era. Its findings are salutary.
— Diane Kirkby, University of Technology Sydney & La Trobe University
This inventive book about new approaches to material culture and labour history is a remarkable intervention in the field of design history. It will, I am confident, incite future scholars to investigate the people, spaces and objects that define and complicate the world of work.
— David Brody, Parsons School of Design
* Academic book pricing can be prohibitive. If you would like to read a copy of Hot Metal or Industrial Craft in Australia, feel free to get in touch and I can arrange something.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Stein, JA, E Humphrys & B Frankham, 2025/26. “Safe Bodies, Hot Plastic? Practical Issues in the Introduction of High-Visibility Workwear (Hi-Vis) in Australia, 1960s–1980s”, Australian Historical Studies, in press.
Stein, JA, and Moore, E. 2024. “Neoliberalising design and the state: The political origins of Australian design policy and design education reform, 1987-1991“, Journal of Design History, vol 37, no. 2, pp. 156-72. PDF
Wain A, Stein JA, Cleghorn M. 2023. ‘ “Rare and vital”: Positive terminology, robust teaching options and contemporary relevance for heritage maker trades‘, Conservar Património, vol. 44, pp. 132–142. https://doi.org/10.14568/cp31208 (Open access)
Stein, JA 2023, ‘Co-option or Recognition? Second-wave Feminist Politics and the Frigidaire Australia Women’s Design Conference, 1980′, Journal of Design History, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 268-87. PDF
Stein, JA 2022, ‘Unresolved tensions in green transitions: retraining and the question of ‘how’?’ Dialogues in Human Geography. This is part of a Dialogues in Human Geography‘s Forum; the article responds to Chantel Carr’s ‘Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis‘ (2022). PDF
Stein, JA 2020, ‘The Trade Educators’ Syndicate: Making 10 Retirement Lathes in the Twilight of Australian Manufacturing‘, Digital Culture & Society, vol. 6, no. 1 (special issue: Alternative Histories in DIY Cultures and Maker Utopias), pp. 203-06. PDF
Stein, JA 2020, ‘When Manufacturing Workers Make Sculpture: Creative Pathways in the Context of Australian Deindustrialisation‘, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 89-212. PDF
Crosby, A. and Stein, JA, 2020, ‘Repair’, Living Lexicon entry, Environmental Humanities vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 179–185. PDF (Open Access)
Stein, JA 2019, ‘The Production of Toolboxes and Hand Tools in Industrial Craft Apprenticeship’, Journal of Modern Craft, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 233-54. PDF
Stein, JA 2019, ‘Hidden between craft and industry: Engineering patternmakers’ design knowledge’, Journal of Design History, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 280-303. PDF
Stein, JA 2017, ‘Political imaginaries of 3D printing: Prompting mainstream awareness of design and making’, Design and Culture, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 1–26. PDF
Stein, JA 2016, ‘Masculinity and material culture in technological transitions in the workplace: From letterpress to offset-lithography, 1960s – 1980s’, Technology & Culture, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 24–53. PDF
Stein, JA 2015, ‘Making “foreign orders”: Australian print-workers and clandestine creative production in the 1980s’, Journal of Design History, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 275-92. PDF
Stein, JA 2014, ‘The co-construction of spatial memory: Enriching architectural histories of “ordinary” buildings’, Fabrications, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 178-97. PDF
Stein, JA 2013, ‘“That was a posed photo”: Reflections on the process of combining oral histories with institutional photographs’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal (now known as Studies in Oral History), vol. 35, pp. 49–57. PDF
Stein, JA 2011, ‘Domesticity, gender, and the 1977 Apple II personal computer’, Design & Culture, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 193–216. PDF
Stein, JA 2011, ‘Eames Overload and the Mystification Machine: The IBM Pavilion at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair’, Seizure, vol. 2, pp. 57–63. PDF
Lunney, D, Matthews, A, Stein, JA, & Lunney, HM, 2003, ‘Australian bat research: The limitations of the Action Plan for Australian Bats in determining the direction of research’, Pacific Conservation Biology, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 255-60.
SCHOLARLY BOOK CHAPTERS
Stein, JA and Carr C., 2025, “Climate transition possibilities at design’s edges: Labour, skill, care and repair”, in Designing through planetary breakdown, as above. (Open Access: Available here) PDF
Stein, JA. 2025. ‘Craft labour, entrepreneurialism and social class in contemporary Australia’, in D. Wood (ed), The Politics of Global Craft. Bloomsbury. (in press)
Stein, JA, 2025, “’Creative technicians’ and ‘technical creatives’: Transferable skills for challenging times” in Working through planetary breakdown: Labour, skill and the changing climate, edited by C Carr and JA Stein, Routledge. (Open Access)
Carr, C and JA Stein, 2025, “Skill, industrial transformation and work in a climate changing world”, in Working through planetary breakdown, as above. (Open Access)
Stein, JA, 2025, “Saving the loom: Tracing one machine’s 20-year journey from strategic government investment to small-scale craft volunteerism,” in Designing through planetary breakdown: Locating material knowledge and practical skill, edited by Stein and Carr, Routledge. PDF
Stein JA. 2023. ‘Conflicting Interpretations of ‘Design’ and ‘Premature Product Obsolescence’: Australia’s Right to Repair Inquiry 2020–2021’, in Kalantidou, Eleni, Keulemans, Guy, Mellick-Lopes, Abby, Rubenis, Niklavs, Gill, Alison (eds), Design/Repair: Place, Practice & Community. Springer, 13-39. PDF
Stein, JA, 2022, ‘The Historian as Document Producer: A Critical Reflection on the Production of Oral History Timed Summaries’, in K. Biber, T. Luker & P. Vaughan (eds), Law’s Documents: Materiality, Authority, Aesthetics, Routledge, London, 112-128. PDF
Stein, JA, and Rowden, E, 2019, ‘Architecture from the Inside: Challenging the Myths of Architectural History through the Oral Histories of Maitland Gaol’, in Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research, in Janina Gosseye, Naomi Stead and Deborah van der Plaat (eds), Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 28-49. PDF
COMMISSIONED or INVITED ESSAYS
Stein, JA 2014, ‘The thinking man’s food processor: Domesticity, gender, and the Apple II’ in Interface: People, Machines, Design, Powerhouse / Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences (MAAS), Sydney, pp. 26–31. PDF
Stein, JA 2014, ‘Who gives a … ? Contemporary design and an ethic of care’, in CUSP – Designing for the next decade, Object Australian Design Centre, Sydney.
Stein, JA 2011, ‘Conversations from the Wonder Chamber: Jesse Adams Stein in conversation with Matthew Connell’ in L Muller L & B Dean (eds), Awfully Wonderful: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art, Performance Space, Sydney, pp. 14–19. PDF
REVIEWS
Stein JA 2022, ‘Review: Craft: An American History by Glenn Adamson’, Journal of Design History, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 193-95, online.
Stein, JA 2017, ‘Labour, entrepreneurialism and the creative economy in neoliberal times’, (Review of Angela McRobbie’s Be Creative), Fashion Theory, vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 609-615. PDF
Stein, JA 2010, ‘Design in the Age of Darwin’, Design & Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 90–3. PDF
Stein, JA 2011, ‘Social Sculpture’, Runway, no. 19, July, pp. 72–75.
REFEREED CONFERENCE PAPERS
Wain, A, Stein, JA & Cleghorn, M, 2022, ‘Rare and vital trades: Keeping skills for the future’, Big Stuff: Working together? Conservation and safeguarding of industrial and technology heritage, Seixal, Portugal, September.
Hermens, A, Simpson, AV, Berti, M, and Stein, JA, 2017, ‘Under new management, tradition of innovation and innovation of tradition: the case of constructive disruption in a family firm’, ANZAM (Australia and New Zealand Academy of Management), Brisbane.
Simpson, AV, Berti, M, Stein, JA, and Hermens, A, 2016, ‘Sensemaking in managing a family firm’s “tradition of innovation”’, 32nd EGOS Colloquium ‘Organizing in the Shadow of Power’, Naples, 7–9 July.
ACADEMIC THESES
Stein, JA, 2014, Precarious Printers: Labour, Technology & Material Culture at the NSW Government Printing Office, 1959–1989, PhD Thesis, School of Design, Faculty of Design, Architecture & Building, University of Technology Sydney. Supervisor: Dist. Prof. Peter McNeil, Dr Susan Stewart.
Stein, JA, 2009, Domesticity and Gender in the Industrial Design of Apple Computer, 1977–1984, Masters Thesis, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Supervisor, Prof. Michael Golec.
Stein, JA, 2005, Public Art and Site Specificity: Critical Dilemmas in the Sydney Sculpture Walk, Honours thesis (Class 1 & the University Medal), College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. Supervisor: Prof Susan Best.
Jesse Adams Stein 