Cultural and Historical Studies

Models on the beach in bright coloured clothing and bags covering their faces.

The Cultural and Historical Studies Department at LCF is home to a ground-breaking collective of researchers and educators with expertise in the theory and history of fashion as a socioeconomic, cultural and political practice.

Our research, teaching, and knowledge exchange activities are focused on how fashion, everyday dress, art, visual and bodily practices create identities and can be a source of positive collective action and systemic change in the face of economic and social inequalities, structural racism and climate injustice.

We explore the manifold histories and contemporary critical issues of fashion as a transnational cultural production, material culture, image economy, emotional and sensory experience, and a means of political transformation.

We make an impact by cultivating a critical fashion citizenship through sharing and co-creating knowledge with a large, diverse group of LCF undergraduate, masters’ and PhD students as well as with the media, creative and industry practitioners, cultural institutions, and civil society organisations.

We mobilise critical thinking, supported by a compassionate pedagogy of collaborative learning, to imagine possible futures, including democratised fashion systems, based on an understanding of the interdependency of nature, humanity and non-human species; equity for equality; and social, racial and climate justice.

Our research interests are in:

· the politics of identity and difference in human and post-human contexts,

· material culture, embodiment, and sensory experience,

· digitalisation and dematerialisation,

· the global economy of fashion production, appropriation, and labour relations,

· borders, migration, and diasporic communities,

· social movements of resistance and protest, and

· community engagement through critical, including decolonising, queer and trans, pedagogies and practices.