Lecture 6 Clothing

The next lecture on the module will be on Friday November 7th, about clothing, so it follows on from the Design Museum Exhibition on Women, Fashion, Power; and links to the 14th November visit to the cloth makers in Yorkshire.
Among the questions to consider are:

- should sociologists be interested in fashion?
- what can the production and consumption of fashion tell us about social relations?
- what do you wear, and why?
- How much do you know about where the clothes you wear come from, and what material they are made of?

Seminar Preparation

Group D: Where have your clothes come from? What are they made of? (See Timmerman, K. (2011) Where am I Wearing? A global tour to the countries, factories, and people that make our clothes, Hoboken: Wiley: available as E-book) Think about student fashion: is it made of particular materials? Are there key student clothing brands? How do they operate?

Group A: Read Tokatli on Zara and Prada: how do these brands operate?
Tokatli, N. (2008) “Global sourcing: insights from the global clothing industry the case of Zara, a fast fashion retailer”, Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 21-38
Tokatli, N. (2014) “‘Made in Italy? Who cares!’ Prada’s new economic geography”, GeoForum, Vol. 54, pp. 1-9

Group B: Read Benzecry’s article on the Boca Junior jersey: how can a shirt mean so much? Does what it’s made of, its colour and design, matter?
Benzecry, C. (2008) “Azul y Oro: The Many Social Lives of a Football Jersey”, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 49-76

Group C: Read about the Global Denim Project and the work of Miller and Woodward on Denim: Why has denim been popular? Are there different types and colours? Is denim losing its prominence and fashionability?
Miller, D. and Woodward, S. (2012) Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary, Berkeley: University of California Press (available as an E-book)

Further reading for all: In addition to the above, you may wish to read the extract from Simmel on Adornment (on Moodle): Is jewellery the same as fashion? Why wear it? Does it matter what form/material/colour of jewellery it is?

Session 5 Visit to The Design Museum, London

Whether or not you are attending next Friday’s visit to the Design Museum, your work on the module would benefit from engaging with the rich variety of works on design, aesthetics and design history.

A classic in this field is Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design: Pevsner, N. (2005) [1960] Pioneers of Modern Design, 4th ed. New Haven: Yale University Press

More recently the work of Donald Norman and Harvey Molotch offers insights into the design of day to day objects:
Norman, D. (2002) The Design of Everyday Things, New York: Basic Books
Molotch, H. (2005) Where Stuff Comes From, New York: Routledge
and Julier, G. (2014) Culture of Design, London: Sage gives a useful overview:

As well as the design history of things/objects important to your everyday life, you might also wish to explore the history of the particular material comprising your object of interest, for example:

Galindo, M. (2012) Wood: architecture and design, Salenstein: Braun

More information about the exhibitions at the Design Museum can be found at the Design Museum website.

The new exhibition, Women, Fashion, Power has been featured in a number of pieces:
Daily Telegraph article;
Guardian article.

Lecture 4 Eating and Drinking

The fourth session on Friday October 24th will concern the most important processes that sustain us: eating and drinking. We will explore the role of technology in changing the relationships between humans, animals and foodstuffs, as well as the changing social practices and cultural meanings associated with food.

As ever with the module, the particular topic should be used as an example with wider lessons for your essay topic, suggesting potentially useful concepts and methods of analysis.

For example, many of you have been asked to read this widely cited piece which has lessons extending well beyond the analysis of the particular fruit in question: Cook, I. (2004) Follow the Thing: Papaya, Antipode, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 642-664.

Ian Cook has developed a wider online resource, applying the methodology in that paper: Follow the Things.

Think about why you eat and drink in the ways you do, where the ingredients come from, what kinds of creative and making processes you (or the cook/manufacturer/restaurant/store) deploy in transforming an array of material items into food and drink.

In addition you might wish to reflect on some of the emergent countercultural practices around food, for example the Slow Food Movement.

Lecture 3 Thinking Through Things: Thinking Things Through

The third lecture on Friday October 17th will focus on material culture with the aim of encouraging both intellectual reflection on and, depending on your group task, physical engagement with, things.

In addition to the specific group tasks, among the general readings and links you should consult for a deeper understanding of material culture are:

In anthropology, the work of Daniel Miller, notably his books Stuff and The Comfort of Things; Ian Hodder's book Entangled, and the work of Tim Ingold offer suggestive examples of the kind of orientation to the world that might stimulate your thinking about essays.

The social life of things and the idea of exploring things biographically is expressed in Appadurai, A. (Ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and a later version of the essay can be found in Appadurai, A. (2013) The Future as Cultural Past, London: Verso.

In philosophy, the ontological turn to an enhanced appreciation of materiality is evident in Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter, Durham: Duke University Press, and

Coole, D. and Frost, S. (Eds) (2010) New Materialisms, Durham: Duke University Press. In cultural studies the exploration of everyday life has produced much work on the significance of objects and things for routine cultural practices and ongoing senses of identity formation, see for example:
Highmore, B. (2011) Ordinary Lives, Abingdon: Routledge.

On material culture itself, aside from Daniel Miller, texts such as Woodward, I. Understanding Material Culture and Dant, T. Materiality and Society would be helpful, as would books on particular materials such as Sheller, M. (2014) Aluminium Dreams.

Lecture 2 Theories of Technology

The second lecture on the module on Friday October 10th will explore some of the available theories of technology, highlighting how they address the relationship between technology and social change.

In addition to the specific tasks you were asked to prepare for next week in your groups (as detailed in the E-mail you will have been sent), among the general resources you could explore to provide background for this seminar and foundations for your essay are:

Matthewman, S. (2011) Technology and Social Theory, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Roe Smith, M. and Marx, L. (Eds) (1994) Does Technology Drive History? Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

On social constructionist approaches see:

Bijker, W., Hughes, T. and Pinch, T. (Eds) (2012) (1987) The Social Construction of Technological Systems, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
The anniversary edition of that text is available as an E-book;
and a book of much wider interest than it sounds about the Moog synthesizer:
Pinch, T. and Trocco, F. (2002) Analog days: the invention and impact of the moog synthesizer, Cambridge: Harvard University Press; also available as an E-book.

On cultural-historical approaches books about energy, neon lighting and railway journeys listed under lecture 1 in the full reading list will provide many ideas for your essays, even if about other topics: e.g.

Schivelbusch, W. (1986) The Railway Journey: the industrialization of time and space in the 19th century, Berkeley: University of California

On actor-network theory

The work of Bruno Latour is essential:
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An introduction to actor-network theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press (available as an E-book).

Bruno Latour's site makes many of his articles available.

Another important thinker in actor-network theory is John Law of the Open University.