Sustainable Clothing
Sustainable Clothing
Each season countless new collections of mass-produced, cheap and disposable clothing are produced, encouraging us as consumers to keep buying more. But the fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world - just after the oil industry - and the environmental damage is increasing as the industry grows.
There are many facets to the causes, effects and possible solutions to this damage: from the social, policy and political issues to technology and economy to pollution, emissions and the effects on landscape, biodiversity and communities. By bringing together researchers from across these fields, the ESI is working to provide insight and solutions to this complex, global issue.
Dr Allen T Alexander
Senior Lecturer in Innovation
Allen’s current research focusses at the firm level (as opposed to policy or individual level), considering how companies bring forward new products and services under the Innovation banner, or how individuals develop Entrepreneurial ventures to deliver new innovations.
He is particularly focusing on the role that firm-level capabilities offer in enabling an organisation to innovate – in particular when focussed on new innovations that would fit within the wider systems-level construct of the Circular Economy. He refers to these as Circular Innovations and encompass organisational capabilities such as Circular-Design Thinking, Circular Value/Process Mapping, Closed-loop Supply-chains and Responsible business practices.
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Dr Joanie Willet
Senior Lecturer in Politics
Joanie’s current research seeks to understand the relationship that people have with clothing; the emotional responses that clothes generate for people; and how we can use those understandings in order to facilitate more sustainable clothing consumption behaviours.
Currently, Joanie is working with Professor Clare Saunders on the AHRC ‘Designing a Sensibility for Sustainability’ project to examine the changes that take place as people learn skills to make, mend, and modify clothing.
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Prof Stefano Pascucci
Professor in Sustainability and Circular Economy
Stefano’s current research focuses on sustainability as connected to entrepreneurship, organization and innovation management theories. His research activities and projects are related to the agribusiness, responsible innovation, community governance and entrepreneurship, and circular economy. He is particularly concerned about how to analyse the interplay between sustainability, innovation, entrepreneurial practices and value chain relations.
He is involved in several research projects, many of which have received funding from a range of sources, and dealing with the following topics:
1) The economic organisations and institutions of circular food systems and regenerative agriculture;
2) Community entrepreneurship and governance in Alternative Food Networks;
3) Configurational analysis and contract design for sustainable agri-food value chains/systems;
4) The governance of multi-stakeholder engagement for sustainability in the agri-food value chains.
Dr Tomas Chaigneau
Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences for Our Environment
Tom’s current research interests revolve around investigating the role the natural environment plays in shaping individual and community wellbeing to improve conservation and natural resource management initiatives (and ensure they don’t push people into serious harm whilst maintaining a flow of benefits for future generations).
As such a current project, Blue Communities seeks to enhance marine spatial planning in SE Asia where colleagues (Matt Fortnam and Louisa Evans) and Tom aim to understand and navigate trade-offs formed (between people, between people and the environment or between scale and time) when implementing no take fishing zones and other forms of resource management interventions.
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Prof Clare Saunders
Professor in Politics
Clare’s current research is focused on trying to improve the conduct of politics. This includes a foray into helping policy-makers finding ways to encourage pro-environmental behaviours.
Currently, Clare is leading the AHRC-funded S4S: Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing project, which explores whether engaging people in clothes-making, mending and modifying workshops can encourage them to think, feel and act more sustainably in relation to clothes.
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Dr Ben Raymond
Associate professor in Microbial Ecology and Entomology
A large proportion of Ben’s research explores sustainable pest management, in particular pest management based on biological and biotechnological approaches.
Much of this work is focussed on the insect pathogen Bacillus thuringienis or Bt. This relates to textiles because Bt is particularly important for modern cotton production as it supplies the insecticidal toxins for genetically modified crops: around 75% of the worlds cotton is GM and uses these toxins.
Ben has researched the evolution of resistance to Bt toxins in a range of insect pests and in other crops in the less developed world. Resistance is critical to the sustainability of cotton production- it drives cycles of innovation in the whole pest management industry. When pest management technologies fail, because of resistance, there are often very serious financial implications for cotton growers across the world.
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Dr Karen Scott
Senior Lecturer in Politics
Karen’s work has focussed on the politics of knowledge and evidence for public policy generally, and more specifically on the area of wellbeing and sustainability. In the politics of knowledge Karen is interested in participation, epistemic justice and more recently gender.
Karen works with people engaged in many forms of pro environmental behaviour e.g. those concerned with pollinator decline, biodiversity, flooding and pollution. Karen has also looked at various arts activities with a wellbeing lens.
Prof Karen Hudson-Edwards
Professor in Sustainable Mining
Karen’s current research focuses on aspects of sustainable mining: characterising the reactivity of and potentially toxicity of mine wastes, designing remediation and management schemes, and improving ecosystem and human health in mining areas. The textiles industry can learn from the techniques developed to remediate mine waste.
Dr David Benson
Senior Lecturer in Politics
David and Dr Senthilarasu Sundaram are involved in ongoing ESRC IAA research in in India involving collaboration with textile dyeing manufacturers in Tamil Nadu and Haryana, to identify methods for remediation of textile and leather industry wastewater.
They are working with colleagues at CINVESTAV (Mexico City) on British Academy sponsored research into developing advanced nanomaterials for industrial wastewater remediation and in collaboration with the University of Delhi on developing wastewater remediation technologies for textile and leather industry wastewater remediation.
Dr Senthilarasu Sundaram
Lecturer in Renewable Energy
Senthil and Dr David Benson are involved in ongoing ESRC IAA research in in India involving collaboration with textile dyeing manufacturers in Tamil Nadu and Haryana, to identify methods for remediation of textile and leather industry wastewater.
They are working with colleagues at CINVESTAV (Mexico City) on British Academy sponsored research into developing advanced nanomaterials for industrial wastewater remediation and in collaboration with the University of Delhi on developing wastewater remediation technologies for textile and leather industry wastewater remediation.
Dr Delacey Tedesco
Lecturer in Politics
My background includes environmental/green politics and political theory (coastal temperate rainforest conservation campaigns and the politics of nature/culture, rural/urban discourses within sustainability); and coloniality/postcoloniality/decoloniality and settler colonial cities, and thus issues of environmental/sustainability campaigns working with and against Indigenous knowledge, land use practices, and self-determination.
My current work focuses on the politics of fashion, following a few different lines:
1) Drawing on urban theory, studying how fashion is framed as an urban practice, and thus the spatial hierarchies that excludes both postcolonial and rural places from 'fashion' practices;
2) Work on the affective and aesthetic economies of fashion (how feelings and sense of value circulate via fashion and dress practices), and the forms of pleasure and desire that fashion generates (and that are arguably key to the ways that 'education' about sustainability might not shift behaviour - there are strong links here to Clare and Joanie's fantastic work on creating a sense for sustainability);
3) A conceptual engagement with 'material metaphors' of fashion and politics, and thus an interest in texture, pattern, textiles, and how these materially sustain metaphors such as social and urban 'fabric', the 'body politic' and other related imaginaries
4) Explorations of fashion and dress curation as a methodology for engaged, collaborative research - through which I completed a 1 week training course in fashion curation at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
