Performing Eurasia in the textiles and clothing businesses along the Silk Road

The article looks at the processes, metaphors and politics of the “Silk Road” as an ideological concept and the ways in which “authenticity” is actively constructed, implemented and performed as a strategy for development by government, non-governmental agencies and business owners. Case studies from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan are touched upon and material from interviews, observations and examples from material culture presented. This project seeks to analyse: the culture of the textiles business in Central Asia and how this operates at the seams of national-ethnic identity within the Eurasian context; the formal and informal business practices of the everyday, operating within the discourses of economic development; and how consumer culture may be interrogated as a means for performing identity at the local and global perspectives. Contemporary intersectional approaches to understanding the business of textiles and fashion in Central Asia should redress the marginalisation of academic efforts across multiple disciplines to unite the region inwardly and outwardly and call for an integrated approach to considering both the cultural and economic value of handmade textiles, which acknowledges and makes visible the role of the artisan, the designer, the entrepreneur, the retailer and all the stages that exist in the value chain between production the final consumer. The precursors to the current framework of research necessarily lie in the work of scholars of development and industrialisation established during the Soviet period. Their expertise must be called upon to enrich the perspective presented here, which is focused on contemporary craftsmanship and enterprise in Central Asia and how current practices in design and business may offer fruitful opportunities for development of the New Silk Road project, both intellectually and economically

Constructing fashionable dress and identity in Bhutan

Whilst working as Head of Fashion in LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore (2007-2010) I was approached by Singapore International Foundation (SIF) to act as a Specialist Volunteer Overseas to co-develop a tailoring curriculum for the Ministry of Labour and Human Resources in Bhutan in an international development project funded by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 2008-2009. In this chapter I present a critical reflection on our curriculum and broadly situate the role of international development projects focused on textiles and dress within discourses of globalisation. I examine how the interaction with non-governmental and inter-governmental agencies may combine with ideas about dress and identity within the recipient country. I wish to personify the processes through which these ‘hybrid’ identities are constructed, both physically and metaphorically, through ideas about fashionable dress present in garments and online discussions about them to challenge simplistic essentialist thinking about the ways in which ‘fashion’ is adopted by a ‘non-western’ culture

An analysis of the vertical structure equation for arbitrary thermal profiles

The vertical structure equation is a singular Sturm-Liouville problem whose eigenfunctions describe the vertical dependence of the normal modes of the primitive equations linearized about a given thermal profile. The eigenvalues give the equivalent depths of the modes. The spectrum of the vertical structure equation and the appropriateness of various upper boundary conditions, both for arbitrary thermal profiles were studied. The results depend critically upon whether or not the thermal profile is such that the basic state atmosphere is bounded. In the case of a bounded atmosphere it is shown that the spectrum is always totally discrete, regardless of details of the thermal profile. For the barotropic equivalent depth, which corresponds to the lowest eigen value, upper and lower bounds which depend only on the surface temperature and the atmosphere height were obtained. All eigenfunctions are bounded, but always have unbounded first derivatives. It was proved that the commonly invoked upper boundary condition that vertical velocity must vanish as pressure tends to zero, as well as a number of alternative conditions, is well posed. It was concluded that the vertical structure equation always has a totally discrete spectrum under the assumptions implicit in the primitive equations

Comparison of Standard Length, Fork Length, and Total Length for Measuring West Coast Marine Fishes

Measurements of adult marine fishes on the U.S. west coast are usually made using one of three methods: standard length, fork length, or total length. Each method has advantages and disadvantages. In this paper we attempt to determine whether one method is faster and/or more reliable than the other methods. We found that all three methods were comparable. There was no appreciable difference in the time it took to measure fish using the different methods. Fork length had the most reproducible results; however, it had the highest level of bias between researchers. We therefore suggest that selection of measurement type be based on what other researchers have used for the species under study. The best improvement in measurement reliability probably occurs by adequate training of personnel and not type of measurement used

'Garland' at MYB Textiles

A one-person exhibition of paintings at the Lace Mills of Morton Young and Borland (MYB). The aim of the research was to reflect through painting and drawing processes pictorial aspects of lace design. The company was founded in 1900 in the Irvine Valley of Ayrshire, Scotland. In 1913 MYB Textiles invested in Nottingham lace Looms. MYB Textiles is now the only producer in the world manufacturing patterned lace with original Nottingham Lace Looms. This manufacturing process is extremely labor intensive. The methods employed by Kathleen through painting and drawing aim to mimic the structure of the lace. This group of paintings was achieved and developed in terms of enlarging the original lace structure and painting this on an architectural scale. The rationale for investigating the painting process in this context is to construct a pictorial handmade series of painted pattern formations. To accompany the exhibition Kathleen has also been working with Emma Dick to record the painting process and the textile pattern in an artist’s book. ISBN978 1 85924 533