Repair and Society

Jo Turney is a Professor and the Doctoral Programmes Director at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. She researches everyday fashion, dress and textile practices. She is the author of The Culture of Knitting addressing knitting as art, craft, design, fashion and performance, and as an aspect of the everyday. She is the founder and editor of Clothing Cultures journal. Her current research considers the 1970s domestic interior in the UK and US, and discusses the blurring of boundaries between home and state through notions of 'freedon', consumption practices, interior design and the adoption of a neo-liberal project.

In this episode we meet with Emmeline de Mooij and Margreet Sweerts, founders of the Feminist Needlework Party (Feministische Handwerk Partij, FHP), a political feminist artists’ movement that focuses on studying, repairing, speaking, patching up, unlearning and mending. The FHP organizes performative actions and workshops with which it investigates the underexposed history of textile production within the daily reality of women and wants to achieve a higher appreciation of care, maintenance and repair.

Kate Sekules is a writer, historian, teacher, and lifelong mender. Kate is a professor of fashion history at Pratt Institute, she also teaches her class "Mending Fashion" at Parsons NYC. Her book "MEND! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto" was published by Penguin in 2020. Kate is currently completing her PhD dissertation 'A History and Theory of Mending' at Bard Graduate Center, New York, after which she will in her own words 'have actually earned the title Dr Mend—my alter ego who dispenses mendication Rx in clothes surgeries'.

Bridget Harvey is a maker who investigates process, occupying a fluid space between craft and design, making and remaking. In her work she embraces interdisciplinarity, using found objects and materials like fired ceramics, wood, and textiles. Through the artefacts she examines ideas like pace, repetition, and playfulness. Since 2013 she has been focused on repair within multiple disciplines, and as independent practice. Bridget did her practice-based PhD 'Repair-Making: Craft, Narratives, Activism', her selected exhibitions include Repair-Making and the Museum, V&A Museum, 15th - 22nd September 2019, Eternally Yours, Somerset House, 16th June - 25th Sept 2022, Repair Revolution!, Museum fur Gestaltung Zurich, from 31st March 2023.

Iryna Kucher is an Eco-Social designer and a PhD Fellow at Design School Kolding. She is a member of Design for Planet -- LAB for Sustainability and Design. Iryna's PhD project focuses on the study of the slow rhythm of consumption in the field of fashion, addressing its attention to the practices of mending, both traditional and new. It analyses the meaning of these practices in Western and Eastern societies in the past and future.