Labor in the Creative Industries - The Case of Fashion
Call for papers: This international conference will shed new light on labor in the creative industries, with a special focus on fashion.
Place: Oslo Metropolitan UniversityDate and time: Tuesday 11. June 2019 09:00 – Wednesday 12. June 16:00
Keynote speaker
Pouillard, Véronique; University of Oslo.
Call for Papers
On the occasion of the exhibition “Tomorrowear. A French Story” at Villa Stenersen, this international conference will shed new light on labor in the creative industries, with a special focus on fashion. The present conference intends to do so without chronological nor geographical limitations.
Since the exhibition explores the work of emerging fashion designers, the conference encourages papers that research so-called canonical figures of the fashion industry, such as fashion designers, photographers, and models, provided that they uncover new aspects on said figures, and challenge historiographic accounts of them.
Beyond the framework of the exhibition, the conference welcomes papers on all workers of the fashion industry from fashion PRs to sewing workers, buyers, influencers, etc. Of particular interest are papers that analyze overlooked fashion professions, forgotten professions, and emerging professions, together with professionalization of new practices.
We invite papers that consider questions of work processes and networks, as well as structural and institutional aspects of labor in the global fashion industry.
We welcome relevant papers from many different fields of research, including but not limited to history, sociology, anthropology, management, marketing, organization, and literature. Additionally, we look forward to papers fostering an interdisciplinary approach.
We are open to those providing a comparative approach, not only between fashion and other creative industries such as music, but also in terms of geographical areas (countries, regions, clusters, cities, etc.) Given the exhibition’s focus on France, we particularly encourage papers comparing labor in the French fashion industry with labor in foreign industries.
Papers may address one or several of the following areas, but are not limited to them:
- The creative class and creative labor in the fashion industry, including questions on the redefinition (or lack thereof) of the profession of fashion designer, personalization of fashion in the fashion designer, and issues of transfer of creativity within fashion companies;
- Affective labor in the fashion industry;
- New and old fashion jobs, including the professionalization of new fashion activities;
- Collective labor and invisible labor in the fashion industry;
- Representations of fashion labor;
- Ethical labor and labor conditions in the fashion industry;
- Fashion education and the training of fashion workers;
- Professional organizations; trade unions; labor movements and activists.