Material Acts of Resistance: Researching, reconstructing, and re-imagining socio-political clothing stories
Dr Kat Jungnickel
Tues 14th June 10:30 – 12:00, Aud 2
Clothing is a critical socio-technology of everyday life; both mundane and familiar and invested with social and political significance. The political subject is (almost) always dressed (and even when they are not, this too is a potent act). This lecture focuses on two projects: Bikes & Bloomers is about convertible cycling costumes patented by pioneering women in 1890s Britain and Politics of Patents maps connections between citizenship and clothing in global patent archives from 1820 to 2020. This research takes a feminist technoscience and inventive practice approach to examine how and in what ways inventors create new forms of clothing that resist, subvert or disrupt social and political norms and beliefs, and in the process, bring new expressions of citizenship into being. Using patent archives, ethnographic methods and speculative sewing, the research seeks to open for discussion embodied, object-oriented and performative ways of thinking with, in and through inventive forms of knowledge making and transmission. Throughout, I reflect on the intimacy of making and wearing the clothes of others and what happens when as researchers we get up close to (and into) our research.
Bio:
Dr Kat Jungnickel is a Reader in Sociology, Director of the Methods Lab and PI on the European Research Council–funded project Politics of Patents, which examines citizenship via two hundred years of global clothing inventions. Her research explores mobilities, gender, technology cultures, DIY/making practices, and visual and inventive methods. Recent publications include: (ed) Transmissions: critical tactics for making and communicating research (MIT Press 2020), Creative Practice Ethnographies (with Hjorth, Harris and Coombs, Rowman & Littlefield 2020) and Bikes and Bloomers: Victorian Women Inventors and their Extraordinary Cycle Wear (Goldsmiths Press 2018).