fashion designers who are based in the American city. Present at the show are the designers who have transformed the textiles, produced by refugees in Kenya, into pieces of clothing for American consumers who wish to support social entrepreneurship as a development and gender strategy. However, the refugee women, whose artisan efforts undergird the fashion show, are absent, reinforcing the traditional production patterns of periphery and core that
their existing roles. From a part-time employer in the storage room, one of the graduates got promoted to manage the inventory of a women’s clothing store. Another found a job in a local trading and services company and was promoted to a senior web developer within a year. A third example is of a forklift driver who decided to quit his job after excelling in the advanced DST track and joined a local start up as a software developer. By 2020, seed funding of US$1500 from WFP
HIV by 50–60 per cent. Why did you end the circumcision activity? Léon Salumu: We ended that activity because other organisations were taking care of it and getting better results. Culturally, circumcision isn’t readily accepted by Ndhiwa’s Luo community. Unlike us, the other actors were giving cash or clothing to candidates who agreed to be circumcised. We didn’t use that strategy because we couldn’t agree on it internally. The ‘opponents’ argued that
than it has ever been … what they require from us is food, clothing, medical and surgical assistance, to give them strength for labor.’ The statement however also betrayed the fact that ongoing relief efforts – now reformulated as reconstruction assistance – were facing debate. After the war’s end, ‘American popular and political enthusiasm for a major postwar humanitarian intervention quickly eroded’ ( Irwin, 2013 : 142). The passionate support of wartime relief did not continue once peace settled in. Accompanied by public fatigue with international assistance, the
This book presents the rich fabric of language, clothing, food, and architecture which forms the diverse religious, political, cultural and ethnic identities of humanity. The colour of a scarf, the accent of a conversation, can unite people or divide them, and the smallest detail can play its part in signalling who are allies and who are enemies, as much for elites as for citizens in a democracy. Human identity is neither rigidly determined nor unpredictable and spontaneous, but between those two extremes is the forum on which the public life of humanity is generated. After a century in which an assumption was held across the ideological spectrum from left to right and from Marxists to economic individualists that the rational pursuit of material gain underlay social and political activity, the fundamental importance of the cultivation and preservation of identity is re-emerging across the whole spectrum of politics in which Britain is one example only. Yet while identity is the dimension in which public life is conducted, it is inherently paradoxical: on the one hand people cultivate their identity by association with a group, or religion, or nation, whilst on the other hand they distinguish themselves from their associates within those groups by presenting an intensified or purer form of the qualities which otherwise unite them. So identity simultaneously generates equality and inequality, between identification by association, and identity by exclusion and differentiation; it is both the engine of public life, and the cause of its confusion and conflict.
This Open Access edition was funded by London School of Economics and Political Science.
or principle which is no more than a summary of what it seeks to explain. What applies to birds applies with even greater force to humans, animals who wear not only their own skin and hair, but that of other creatures as well, adding to and extending their own plumage by creating for themselves second and third skins of clothing which are as much a part of who they are as are the feathers of the sparrow or the plumes of the peacock, and no more artificial than a sparrow's nest. Human plumage, as a tangible component of human identity, is not
step I take, I perceive how local people connect with each rock shaped in the architecture, blending with the smells of food, their bodies and the colours of their clothing. In their walking, I imagine the history of their ancestors, while different materialities vibrate on a similar note as if they were music. Everything is intertwined in wandering time. After travelling from the coast to the Andean mountain range in Wallmapu , I became fascinated with the genesis of Mapuche jewellery and its strong
identity, and a narrowing, though not a vanishing, of the distances between various rungs in the social ladder and of the privileged and penalising differentiations of gender. If distinctions, exclusions, and privileges remained, they nonetheless increasingly, if unsteadily, did so within a common forum, rather than in a society rigidly even if not impermeably divided between the classes and the masses. At every stage, clothing, manners, speech, diet, and religion have been part of those identities. And so also are the accounts, claims, and challenges about these
in this ’. 60 Pepys, a tailor’s son, clearly agreed. On one occasion, after purchasing a new cloak-and-suit ensemble, he noted ‘I must go handsomely, whatever it costs me, [as] the charge will be made up in the fruit it brings’. 61 In this respect, Pepys seems to have been typical. Recent research has revealed the considerable economic investment in clothing in the early modern period by women and men alike, and across the social spectrum. 62 Outer clothing was amongst the most conspicuous items of early
Over twenty-five contributors from around the world have prepared short, accessible chapters that take a striking image as a starting point to explore how today’s global financial structures are haunted by the ghosts of empire. Anyone interested in knowing more about the legacies of racism, colonialism and imperialism, whether newcomer or specialists, will enjoy this unique collection of essays. The volume provides many rich examples to draw on, from the City of London to the Australian outback, from Angola’s railways to China’s ghost cities, from the depths of the ocean to the ethereal world of data. It also tells stories of resistance and contestation, from Maori banks to radical muralists, from subtle gestures to mass uprisings. With chapters on global commodities ranging from oil to clothing to the popular drink Milo, the authors in this collection take an interdisciplinary approach, melding political economy with cultural analysis, critical geography with historical acumen. This book is both a fascinating journey for readers and an invaluable tool for teachers in many fields seeking to awaken students’ curiosity about how the global capitalist economy emerged from and reproduces racialized inequalities.