CALL FOR PAPERS Season Two: Human Stories of Dress
Each season of the series will consist of 6 online seminars, conducted fortnightly over an online platform. Our inaugural season of papers launched Autumn 2020 and we are pleased to release the CFP for season 2, starting in January 2021. Sessions run on Thursday evenings from 6pm.
Sessions will contain papers from two speakers, as we strive to make connections and draw out the symbiotic threads across our work.
Most importantly, the series will encourage collegiality and will be an open, inclusive and friendly space to meet others interested in dress history. We encourage BYO wine, tea or soft drink of choice and invite you to join the post-talk Q&A.
The Sartorial Society Series is organised by a group of dress historians and curators with the aim of celebrating the diverse, innovative, and excellent research emerging in the field of dress history. We want to create a space that welcomes and supports dress historians from all backgrounds, and fosters positive connections within our field.
Dress can tell diverse stories of human life. Its materiality has preserved and privileged different lives to those recorded in print, pen and paint. Dress breaks through the barriers often imposed in written and visual sources, and can be used to understand and explore the lives of those who may have been excluded from the written record.
The field of dress history has championed the representation of women’s stories, but that history is primarily white and wealthy. In this season we want to explore varied stories of human life, and to particularly highlight research where dress is used to access underrepresented stories.
Dress encompasses both shared experience and deeply personal stories. It allows people to tell stories about themselves within their lifetime, while the afterlives of dress enable dress scholars to reassemble and share stories about the past.
We invite contributions of original research that use dress research to access and share varied stories of human life, and particularly seek those stories that are less accessible through more conventional historical or anthropological sources. We welcome papers that are both contemporary and historical, and that take different approaches to the idea of dress telling stories of human life.
Subjects and approaches could include any of the following, always with the focus on human story and narrative:
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Dress production: garment workers, immigrant makers, maker networks
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Dress within distinct communities: traditions, cultural heritage, group identities
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Dress, health and the body: dressing mental health, dressing disabilities, fat positive dressing
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Sartorial biographies: lives of dress, lives through dress
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Dress, gender and sexuality: dressing in the LGBTQIA+ community, dress and romance
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Dress, protest and struggle
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Dress and the wealth divide
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Dress and immigration, travel, relocation: standing out or blending in