Maia Ebsen is currently Assistant Professor at Aarhus University. She has held various visiting scholar positions at institutions including MIT Anthropology and served as Vice President of the Danish Association of Anthropology from 2019 to 2025.

"Based effectively on extensive participant-observation research, the virtue and value of the text lies in its detailed exploration of the entwined tensions that arise between the promise and the pitfalls of both craftwork and collectivism. While the builders at KLAR are idealists, they are also skeptics — and thus are engaging ethnographic subjects from whom the author, and readers, can learn a lot….In short, this is a strong work of ethnography." Heather Paxson, MIT Anthropology

• List of IllustrationsIntroductionChapter 1. An Economy of Freedom: The Foundations of KLARChapter 2. Becoming Builders: Learning the Norms and Forms of “Good Craftsmanship”Chapter 3. The “Family” of KLAR: Generational Continuities and Ruptures in CooperativismChapter 4. Tinkering with Democratic Forms: Negotiating Cooperativism at AssembliesChapter 5. Crafting Against the Standardization of Construction: Reckoning with RegulationChapter 6. Tinkering with Capitalism: The Production of Value in Construction ProjectsConclusion: Taking Politics into One’s Own HandsReferencesIndex