ISGS Abstract

Our understanding of textile and dye crafts, both at the local and global levels, is invariably colored by colonial, national and post-war UN approaches to ‘development and rehabilitation’.  More recently, the neo-liberal wave of institutionalizing art and culture through the frames of ‘heritage’ and/or ‘creative economy’ has begun to shape our ideas and sentiments about handmade textiles, clothing and dyes.

In addition to specialist lectures, conversations, and a roundtable with diverse stakeholders, participants will also undertake local field trips in Leiden and other parts of the Netherlands. At the end of the ISGS, participants will make final presentations responding to each of the three sub-themes, and they will discuss the questions that were raised and the people and places they visited during the course of the project.
 

Themes

In this LeidenGlobal-HAB-IIAS In Situ Graduate School (ISGS) we will aim to interrogate prevailing, dominant discourses through other, less visible, and marginalised vantage points, whilst focusing on three sub-themes:

1. Circulations of textiles and dyes along less visible cartographies
2. Textile and dyes as sites of precarity and meaning
3. Testimonies of past and present subjectivities of cloth, clothing and colour
    

Academic Directors

1. Jody Benjamin, Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Riverside, USA
2. Neelam Raina, Associate Professor of Design and Development, Middlesex University London, UK
3. Pedro Pombo, Associated Researcher at the Centre for Research on Slavery and Indentured Labour, University of Mauritius, Mauritius
    

Organisers

The 2022 In Situ Graduate School Textile and Dyes as Transnational, Global Knowledge is organised by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS, Leiden), Humanities Across Borders (HAB) and LeidenGlobal. For the fieldtrips and lectures, the organisers will work together with local resource partners.
 

More Details:

For more details, check out the ISGS call on the IIAS website.