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The Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University, 5-6 May 2015
Workshop Co-convenors: Joanne Entwistle (King’s College London), Caroline Evans (Central Saint Martins) and Andrea Kollnitz (Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University)
Joanne Entwistle will serve as a co-convenor of this workshop alongside Caroline Evans and Andrea Kollnitz. Caroline Evans, fashion historian and author of Fashion at the Edge (2003) and more recently, The Mechanical Smile (2013), will offer her expertise in technologies of the body as well as the connections between fashion and early 20th century cinema. Art historian Andrea Kollnitz, editor of the forthcoming Modernism och Mode (2014) and a forthcoming research agenda about artistic self-fashioning, will similarly broaden this highly interdisciplinary workshop with her interest in the relationship between fashion and identity.
Call for Papers, Fashion and the Body: An International PhD Workshop
Traditionally, the literature on fashion and dress has tended to ignore the body, while the sociology of the body has tended to ignore dress. However, fashion can be seen as a tool to speak about identity and the body in new ways. One of the great contributions of The Fashioned Body is Entwistle’s discussion of dress as “situated bodily practice”—a paradigm for recognizing that all bodies are inherently dressed bodies, as well as for the dynamic intersections between the body, dress and culture. Working from this legacy, the workshop welcomes PhD papers that interrogate and expand upon the various relationships between fashion and the body, as well as their intersections with identity, power, gender, race, sexuality and the fashion industry.
Furthermore, this workshop will reflect the interdisciplinary nature of fashion studies and aims to bring together disparate research interests from PhD students working within the bounds of critical fashion thinking. We welcome applications from a wide range of academic fields and disciplines including, amongst others, cultural studies, dress history, sociology and anthropology, as well as from students doing applied PhDs in fashion.
The workshop will run for two days during which time the participants will have the chance to present and discuss their research with the convening professors who have engaged in their own research pertaining to issues of fashion and the body. In practical terms, the two-day workshop will be as follows: the PhD student will briefly present a summary of his or her research and one pre-chosen co-chair professor will then comment on the paper and offer feedback. After each presentation, a group discussion will be held with the participating PhD students and the other co-convening professors. At the conclusion of the workshop, the participants will also discuss different opportunities and possibilities for jointly publishing their work in a journal or edited volume.
In addition to the workshop, participants will be invited to attend Dr. Entwistle’s open lecture on the afternoon of 7 May 2015 with a reception to follow.
Practical Information for Applicants
PhD students are invited to submit a 300-word paper abstract along with a brief summary of their doctoral projects by 20 February 2015. Applicants will be informed of their selection two weeks later, on 5 March 2015. Papers of 3,000-4,000 words will be due in-full no later than 17 April 2015.
More practical information—including details about the schedule, meals, social events and the format of presentations and visual aids—will be provided by the organizers in advance of the workshop. Funding is not provided for this event, so students will be required to fund and arrange their own travel and accommodations. Students will, however, receive a certificate as verification of their participation, which they may take back to their home institution to receive course credit.
Interested PhD students are kindly asked to send their applications to the following email address: INFOfashion@ims.su.se
For Further Information
Lauren Downing Peters, PhD Student, Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University
