Have you been following the Centre for Sustainable Fashion’s Better Lives Series?

If you’re in London, get on board (if you haven’t already, that is…)

An excerpt from the series:

“Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this lecture series allows fashion and psychology to come together through a series of discussions to reflect on human fulfilment and ecological prosperity through the theme of judgement and wellbeing.

The series is guided through the Centre for Sustainable Fashion – a test bed for generating new ideas and knowledge with ecological thriving and human fulfilment at their core – and led by the recently appointed London College of Fashion psychologist Dr Carolyn Mair.

Dr Mair argues that in any and all voluntary behaviour, implicitly or explicitly, judgement is used to select from choices or evaluate options. Traditionally, models of judgement were based on rationality and optimality rules such as expected utility theory. However more recently research has shown that humans do not conform to these rules. It is now well understood that we are constrained by the limits of our information processing capacities and that we typically exhibit different, often poor, assessment of risk, reward and probability. This may be due to cognitive overload, physical and emotional constraints or sensory manipulation. Whatever the cause, a reciprocal relationship exists between judgement and wellbeing. They are inextricably intertwined […]” (Centre for Sustainable Fashion)

The latest lecture this week is on “Creativity and Fashion” and features Dr. Kate Fletcher, of Centre for Sustainable Fashion, and Dr. Peter Sowden, of Surrey University.

When? Wednesday, June 12^th How much? Free!

Where? London College of Fashion, Rootstein Hopkins Space, 20 John Princes Street, London, UK

Click here for tickets.

Source: Centre for Sustainable Fashion

Today, April 28^th, marked International Workers’ Memorial Day – a day to remember individuals who have lost their lives or been injured at work.

At the time of writing this post, Aljazeera is reporting 380 dead as a result of the eight story building that collapsed on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Wednesday, April 24^th. This number will continue to rise, as hundreds (an estimated 600, as the Aljazeera story reports) remain unaccounted for.

The heavy news coverage has been bitter sweet. Perhaps this quote from Human Rights Watch sums up why:

“Given the long record of worker deaths in factories, this tragedy was sadly predictable.” (Brad Adams, Asia director, Human Rights Watch)

As details continue to unfold, our thoughts are with the workers – this week and every week.

Suggested readings & resources: BUY Stage, TEACH Stage

Suggested discussion question:

An eight story building collapses on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing hundreds of people. The building contained garment factories manufacturing fast fashion clothing for export to Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Who is responsible?

1. The building owner
2. The building contractors and engineers
3. The factory owners
4. The companies (foreign/domestic) sourcing from the factories (including the designers, the buyers)
5. The Bangladesh government (local/national)
6. The Canadian, British and American governments importing the product
7. The international community (the International Labour Organization, World Trade Organization, etc.)
8. Fashion and business education systems, etc.
9. The end users (the consumers purchasing the imported product)
10. All of the above
11. All of the above and more…

Will you be in Vancouver the week of April 21st? Join us at Vancouver ECO Fashion Week!

Social Alterations is honored to be speaking for the second year in a row at the seminars sessions at Vancouver ECO Fashion Week.

On Sunday, April 21^st, I’m excited to be representing SA at the event, presenting at Session 1: Facing the Issues alongside a whole host of diverse speakers from a variety of companies and organizations.

I will be sharing our view on responsible fashion, but I will also present real key takeaways to help give the audience some realistic action items for change…now.

I’ll be speaking at 12:00pm following Wes Baker with debrand.

Click here to check out the full schedule and to reserve your space. The event will be held at Robson Square: 800 Robson St, Vancouver, BC.

See you there!

Image: Vancouver ECO Fashion Week

Click here for more information.

Application form here.

The summit will take place sometime during the International Textile and Apparel Association (ITAA) Conference, and will make efforts to accommodate participants who cannot attend the event in person through telepresence.

The Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) Summit, in partnership with Educators for Socially Responsible Apparel Business:

“Mission: ESRAB and other educational organizations dedicated to sustainability may support the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) by providing a channel to foster future textiles and apparel professionals through curriculum enhancements. Such curriculum enhancements focus on learning outcomes that are considered fundamental to the implementation of the Higg Index. This curriculum development will lead to improved decision-making among industry professionals to support social and environmental sustainability.” (ITAA, SAC Educational Summit: Call for Applications)

We’re disappointed to hear that Apple has pulled the game Sweatshop from its App store. You can still play the game online.

Our friends at Labour Behind the Label acted as research consultants for the project, supporting the overall learning objectives:

“Far from promoting sweatshops, the game leads players to confront the appalling working conditions and prevalence of human rights abuses often faced by garment workers.” (Anna McMullen, Labour Behind the Label)

We’d like to remind you that the online game Unfair Factory from Labour Behind the Label’s PlayFair 2012 Campaign remains available for use, and is a brilliant online learning activity.

Here’s hoping the Sweatshop will be back in business at Apple soon (that sounded wrong, but you know what I mean…)

Positive Light is a project designed to breakthrough stereotypes associated with poverty in Bangladesh. Although many of the stories we’ve posted on Bangladeshi garment workers have accompanied negative imagery, they do not represent Bangladesh as a whole. For this reason we’re excited to share the Positive Light project with you. All photographs published through Positive Light are licensed under the Creative Commons – perfect for use in classrooms, presentations and campaign material!

Here’s project founder Mikey Leung speaking at TEDxDhaka:

The project will publish a book of select photographs, and is seeking support via crowdsource funding. Click here for details.

Shine Positive Light on Bangladesh from Mikey Leung on Vimeo.

Images by Jeremy Fokkens, Khondker Nasif Akhter and Wahid Adnan, via http://photography.crowdsourced.travel/

In our efforts to connect you to important content online, we rely heavily on third-party tools, programs, sites, and content – linking out to important articles, images and videos, for example. For this reason, you may encounter the occasional dead link (or even the dreaded ‘system error’), when the third party makes a change. Most recently this happened to an important Al – Jazeera video we featured in the Social Alterations Google Earth (SAGE) module, when the video became no longer available online.

We’re happy to report that the film, Mitumba: The second-hand road, by Raffaele Brunetti, is BACK online! This makes Nadira and I crazy happy because Maughan Pearce built and designed two learning activities around the film – sharing discussion questions, key resources & useful links.

To celebrate, we’ve flipped the video through TEDEd (careful, flipping videos can be addictive!!)

Here are the links:

The TEDEd ‘Flip’

In the SAGE module, the lessons are found at the #TOSS stage (just click on the school bus!)

And the direct links to the PDFs for free downloads:

• Mitumba: Mapping the Journey, by Maughan Pearce [Higher Learning Activity]

• Mitumba: Mapping the Journey, by Maughan Pearce [Children’s Learning Activity]

Will you be in Portland on March 27^th? If so, do not miss this exciting panel discussion at Reed College.

Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation) of Native Appropriations and Dr. Jessica R. Metcalfe (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) of Beyond Buckskin  will join Louie Gong (Nooksack) and Se-ah-dom Edmo (Shoshone-Bannock, Nez Perce, & Yakama) for a panel on the misrepresentation of Native American culture in fashion, sport and music.

Here’s the summary:

“In our increasingly global world, raiding the closets of Indigenous peoples has become a trend. Too many companies are guilty of misusing Native American sacred iconography (Victoria’s Secret’s Karlie Kloss in a headdress), or misusing copyrighted Native American names (Urban Outfitters’ Navajo items), or aligning their themes with negative stereotypes (Ecko’s alcohol and headdressed themed Weekend Warriors collection). This panel presents Native American perspectives and deconstructs the issues surrounding the misrepresentation of “the Native” in fashion, sports, and music and provides examples of ethical solutions to help avoid damaging controversies that perpetuate racism in popular culture.” (Reed College, Multicultural Affairs)

Click here for speaker bios and event details.

In January, Vancouver and New York hosted Dr. Kate Fletcher and the Local Wisdom project through partnerships with Hélène Day Fraser at Emily Carr University and Timo Rissanen at Parsons The New School for Design.

Photos and stories from Vancouver and New York are now up and sifting through them is nothing less than delightful.

Further adding to our excitement, Craft of Use has a new online space!

The Craft of Use on “The Practices of Use”:

“The practices of garment use are the ‘nexus of doings and sayings’ associated with wearing, tending and caring for clothes that enable the practical – and social – carrying out of life. They are a dynamic combination of objects, tools, apparatus and the implicit and explicit practical and inspirational knowledge stored in them along with the regular skilful ‘performance’ of our bodies, our ideas about the world, our emotions, motivations and stories and cannot be reduced to one component part. [More]” (Craft of Use)

Do make sure to follow this research!

Image Credit: Screenshot via Local Wisdom – Vancouver, Photographer Jeremy Calhoun