Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper presents a multi-media textual collage that shows rather than tells the lived experiences of my conversion of a DIY campervan over several months in a diesel mechanic workshop in Sydney, Australia. This is a " small culture, " (Holliday, 1999) to which I gained limited access as I developed craft skills and the confidence to speak back to relative, milieu-specific, gendered power. I use autoethnographic textual fragments written shortly after the moment to depict the struggle to acquire skills, build confidence, and cross " small " cultures in an unusual crafting context. Grounded theoretical insights are suggested as they relate to three things. First, I examine the nature of individual, self-directed learning as engendered by the non-expert, hands-on doing of craft supported by YouTube instructional videos. Second, I consider positive and negative affective identity factors, particularly feelings of competence or incompetence and challenges to my own (female, middle-aged, injured, and non-expert) embodiment. Third, I consider the collaborative, discursive ways in which hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities were talked into being as contingent, relational identities against the foil of a constructed " other. "