Serkan Delice

Biography

Dr Serkan Delice is a Senior Lecturer and Research Coordinator in the Department of Cultural and Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion --he also coordinates the delivery of Cultural and Historical Studies within the Fashion Business School.

Having gained a BA in Western Languages and Literatures and an MA in Critical and Cultural Studies from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Serkan worked as a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Sociology at Istanbul Bilgi University between 2003 and 2007. He was then awarded full-time funding for three years by the University of the Arts London to pursue a PhD at the London College of Fashion. Based on archival sources, Serkan's PhD thesis (2015) developed a new method of Queer historiography for understanding the connections between same-sex sexual acts, gender presentations and identifications, and modes of self-fashioning in the early modern Ottoman Empire. His original contribution to knowledge was to consider these connections within a broader historical setting of social transgression, masculinity construction and gendered power relations between state and social actors. By exploring the complex and contested history of gender norms, hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity in the Ottoman Empire---and through its emphasis upon forms of queer identification and subjectivity---his research debunked the nationalist, militarist and heteronormative constructions of masculinity, sexuality and history in contemporary Turkey and the Middle East.

Serkan's current research investigates the possibilities of defining and practicing a transnational ethics of fashion that challenges neoliberal, racial capitalism and its systemic appropriation of labour and culture. Focusing on the historical, and ongoing, centrality of refugee and immigrant labour to fashion production---and drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s idea that refugees ‘driven from country to country represent the vanguard’ of all stateless and displaced people, of all racialised and marginalised Others---he aims to expand the meaning of ‘the refugee’ a) as a recurrent element of the multitude embraced by what Karl Marx calls ‘the disposable industrial army’, that is, ‘a mass of human material always ready for exploitation’ to satisfy the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, especially during periods of crisis, and b) as a political identity that exposes the structurally exclusive character of the nation-state as a racialised and territorial myth of European construction.


RECENT AND FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS:

Delice, S. (2019) 'Thrown Away Like a Piece of Cloth': Fashion Production and the European Refugee Crisis' in Fashion & Politics (ed. Dr Djurdja Bartlett) New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 197-215.

Almila, A. & Delice, S. (eds.) (forthcoming) Fashion's Transnational Inequalities: Socio-political, economic, environmental. London & New York: Routledge.

Delice, S. (2022) 'The Empire’s New Clothes: Representations of Arab women in contemporary fashion journalism' in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 'Fashion and Transnationality Special Issue' (ed. Dr Djurdja Bartlett)

Delice, S. (work-in-progress) 'Appropriation, Viscerality, and Historicism' in Critical Theory Fashion (ed. Dr Marco Pecorari) Durham: Duke University Press.

Delice, S. (work-in-progress) 'Fashion and Decolonisation: A study of Achille Mbembe' in Thinking Through Fashion
A Guide to Key Theorists 2nd edition (eds. Prof Agnes Rocamora and Prof Anneke Smelik). London: Bloomsbury Publishing.


CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS:

Delice, Serkan (2021) Fashion and its refugees: towards a transnational worker solidarity and labour citizenship. In: What is Radical about Cultural Studies Now? Fashion, Culture and Politics in the Age of the Anthropocene, 11 - 12 June 2021, London College of Fashion.

Delice, Serkan (2021) Refugees as a Reserve Army of Labour: neoliberalism and the limits of fashion ethics. In: Reflecting on Refugee Experience, CHS Online Research Seminar Series, 23 March 2021, London College of Fashion.

Delice, Serkan (2021) The Empire’s New Clothes: racial capitalism and the limitations of decolonisation. In: Cultural Urgencies: Decentring Fashion, Roundtable Discussion organised by the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute, 2 March 2021, University of the Arts London.

Delice, Serkan (2020) Fashion production and the European Refugee Crisis. In: Fashion and Politics, Panel Discussion organised by Bookmarks: the socialist bookshop, 30 January 2020.

Delice, Serkan (2019) Cultural Appropriation: Fashion, Race, and the Limits of Critique. In: Being the Other – Orientalizing, Self-Orientalizing and Deconstruction, Workshop organised by Institut für Orientalistik, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, 25-26 July 2019.

Delice, Serkan (2019) Cultural appropriation in translation: fashion, race and the limits of critique. In: A la Mexicana: An encounter of Mexican fashion and artisan techniques: Cultural appropriation panel discussion organised by UAL London College of Fashion MA Fashion Entrepreneurship and Innovation students in collaboration with the Mexican fashion blog Hilando Historias, NGO Impacto and the Mexican Embassy, 3 July 2019, J/M Gallery, London.

Delice, Serkan (2018) Fashion and Emotions in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism. In: New Borders, New Boundaries: Fashion in a Shifting World, Symposium Organised by Calvert 22 Space, 17 March 2018.

Delice, Serkan (2018) Fashion and its refugees: labour, ethics and activism in neoliberal times. In: Symposium: Feminist Visual Activism, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, 10 July 2018.

Delice, Serkan (2018) Cultural appropriation in translation: fashion, race, and the limits of critique. In: EFHA International Conference 2018 Europe and Fashion: Questioning Identities and Cultures, 8–9 November 2018, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.