Fashioning DIY digital archives: Unsettling academic research to centre garment workers’ voices

Abstract

Recent calls for decentring Eurocentric frameworks across fashion studies, alongside growing commitments to worker rights, calls for a circular economy, waste reduction and more sustainable materials draw attention to the complex and intractable social, environmental and political challenges facing the global sector. Here we point out how academic research is also implicated in reproducing inequalities, through practices of data collection, analysis and knowledge dissemination. Specifically, in the case of fashion, how worker representation, and indeed worker control over representations of their lived experiences, including labour activism, is lacking in academic research. In this article, we argue that DIY Academic Archiving can be utilized by academics, including fashion scholars, as a powerful tool for remaking fashion research. We propose unsettling usual practices around data management, as well as redirecting current moves for open research data. Turning instead to inspiration from radical archival theory and practice, we explore the potential for co-creating open-access digital archives of research data – here workers’ own stories – to open up possibilities for workers to be more involved in the creation of public narratives about fashion. While not a panacea for resolving all the ills of the fashion industry, we see research processes where workers have more control over their own stories, and how they are used, as a critical step in reimagining fashion scholarship.