Dilemmas of Development and The Reconstruction of Fashion

Sustainable development by its nature appears elusive. It seems the more we try to capture and pin it down the more it moves away from us leading us into murkier waters and all manner of contradictions. No more is this felt than in the fashion industry where we are presented with a number of oppositions. The fashion cycle renders styles obsolete before they have worn out generating waste and over-consumptive practices. But it can also bring into the fore practices that have resonance to sustainable development in terms of their location, orientation and consideration for the environment. As studies emerge considering the detrimental environmental impacts of the manufacture and consumption of new clothes, second-hand clothes have become a focus for research endeavours considering how they can be reincorporated into the fashion system and have resonance to an ever ‘fashion’ hungry consumer. This chapter discusses methods for the processing of second-hand clothes into fashionable items and, by drawing on the wealth of ‘waste’ materials through reselling, restyling and remanufacturing, argues that ways of re-appropriating them into a more environmentally focused fashion industry is possible and necessary. It sets out as it hypothesis that the global fashion system has value in its transformative powers but that damaging and exploitative forces are still preventing it from being a force for good. This is due to the nature of the items being produced, the way they are manufactured and how they are ultimately consumed and disposed of

Geografie relazionali nella storia del design

Con il tema delle “geografie relazionali” l'intenzione di questo numero è di valorizzare studi e ricerche che assumono approcci tipici delle scienze sociali per la comprensione e la spiegazione del design. Questo, infatti, oltre ad essere fatto di “cose”, strutture materializzate (come la nazione o la comunità), individui e meccanismi, è composto soprattutto di reti e fatti sociali: un insieme intricato e complesso di intersecazioni, rete di flussi e di relazioni..

(Un)becoming women: Indian factory women's counternarratives of gender

This paper portrays the life stories of five factory workers in Delhi whose life trajectories run counter to normative femininity. As daughters and wives, they are neglected, abandoned or rejected by their families; they live alone, with their parents past the age that is their natal right, with siblings, or with families and men who are not related to them. I explore the circulation of their counternarratives and how their gender transgressions go public through ordinary forms of talk, such as gossip and rumor. I argue that their move out of the normative is not produced by, but produces, their gender politics; that their agency emerges cognitively from the telling of their stories in tandem with their interlocutors' credulity and uptake; and that the site of gender politics for working class Indian women lies in the informal subaltern publics that are formed by the circulation of their stories. Contrary to the notion of a stable unitary subject that precedes the political, these women's counternarratives demonstrate the subject‐in‐process as a political effect. Their alterity does not exist outside the heteronormative gender order but demarcates the boundaries of its historicity, hinting at both the internal contradictions of existing gender relations and their future possibilities.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112196/1/j.1467-954X.2011.02026.x.pd

From Mexico to Beijing: "Women in Development" Twenty Five Years On

During the past twenty five years the Women in Development (WID)approach has become an increasingly important issue in the literature on Third World development. WID issues and related activities have now been incorporated into the aid practice of most development agencies. This paper critically analyses the diverse and conflicting ideologies that have emerged in the WID literature since the early seventies

Environment: Contributions of Design and Education to the Sustainment of Planet Earth

Any book that aims to deal with issues of sustainable futures will necessarily have a significant focus on environmental sustainability. Historically, concerns over sustainable futures were predominantly focused on the environment, with references going back as far as, for example, the 7th century when legislation was introduced to protect birds in the Farne Islands off the north east coast of England. More recently there has been recognition that sustainable futures depend on complex sets of relationships