ARTH 614 Issues and Topics in Craft Studies: Textiles, Fashion, and Ethical Practices from the Arts and Crafts Movement

• Thursdays, 2:45 – 5:45 p.m.
• Room EV-3.760
• Professor Johanna Amos

This seminar considers ethical practices in the production, consumption, use, and care of textiles and fashion from the nineteenth-century arts and crafts movement to the emerging fibreshed movement. Through a series of focused discussions and case studies, including slow fashion, fair trade, and the home arts industries, this course will examine how makers and consumers have sought sustainable and alternative models to the ecologically destructive and exploitative excesses of the textile and fashion industries. We will further investigate how social and political activists have turned the material properties and feminine associations of fibre to their advantage, probe the tension between handcrafted and technological approaches to sustainability, and assess the ethical implications of collecting and displaying textiles with living cultural significance.