SI overview: Re-imagining and re-making futures has always been central to feminism and its intersections with other minoritarian movements, including queer, Black and anti-racist, disability and class based practices. In the context of growing interest in practice research and interdisciplinary methodologies, and at a historical moment when hopefulness is perhaps needed more than ever, we invite expressions of interest for contributions to a planned special issue exploring how methodologies are involved in the creation of futures. The special issue includes contributions from interdisciplinary scholars working in and across disciplines including art and design, visual cultures, history, literature, creative writing, geography, sociology, anthropology, media studies, cultural studies, film, architecture. Contributions address how fabulation functions as a method to re-imagine, map out and/or create feminist futures, with attention paid to how fabulation is or might be a future-making practice.

Abstract: This article collectively discusses creative feminist approaches to ethnographic methods developed in response to challenging social, personal, environmental, and temporal conditions and pressures. Patchwork Ethnography, developed by Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma and Chika Watanabe, recognises mundane pressures, and works with insights and experiences that emerge not only from doing research, but from what happens around the edges. By rendering the many ‘seams’ of research visible, and valuable, their approach aims to develop creative, kind, and more generous — yet no less robust —research realities. Drawing inspiration from Patchwork Ethnography this article takes a creative approach to the craft of conversation, valuing the fragments, drawing attention to edges and intersections of our collective thinking, research, and experiences and stitching them together into a unique patchworked piece. Throughout, in the spirit of the theme of this special issue, we ask what kinds of ethnographic methods can create new and different futures? What are, or could be, feminist futures of ethnography?

Key words: collaboration, ethnography, experimentation, futures, methods, patchwork

Abstract: This article is about stories embedded in clothes and clay. We explore patented historic clothing and reclaimed earth bowls as sites of alternative stories, research methods and knowledge. At first glance they appear to have little in common. Yet, they are intimate and mundane artefacts that contain things —bodies and food. They retain their own uses, and hold more, such as stories about lived pasts and imagined futures. Both are central to our research in sociology, art and landscape. We discuss how these ordinary artefacts become extra-ordinary translations in our interdisciplinary creative practice, helping us understand and respond to larger socio-political issues around gender equality, private/public space, citizenship and climate crisis. Critically, we argue that (re)makings of clothing and clay and their translations are containers (of knowledge) and not mere artefacts (of representation).

Key words: citizenship, collaboration, gender, invention, material, practice research, translations

Abstract: Who gets to be ‘sporty’ and active in public is an enduring topic of socio-political debate. Disparities in participation continue from limited access, support and funding to ill-fitting equipment and clothing. This article focuses on the latter. Women have long been disproportionally restricted and harassed in public space not only in relation to how, where and when they move but also what they wear. I approach this issue via a unique data source – global clothing inventions for sport and athletic activities (1890–1940). Analysing convertible, multiple and hidden clothing patents, by and for women, reveals how inventors tackled ongoing socio-political restrictions to women’s freedom of movement from the ground up and, often secretly, from the inside out. I suggest these data might be read as acts of resistance, enabling wearers to move and inhabit spaces in new ways, engage in a wider range of activities and make claims to equal public participation and mobility rights. These lesser-known clothing inventions invite us below the surface of conventional sporting histories, expand ideas around the creative possibilities of sport and activewear, and spark imaginaries of what other kinds of inclusive and inventive athletic identities might be possible.

Keywords: clothing, inventions, making and doing, reconstructions, sewing, citizenship

Abstract: Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, personal protective equipment (PPE) became central to daily news. Face masks may have been critical, but they were clearly not equally designed or distributed, compelling many women health workers to make their own. These issues are neither new nor specific to health-oriented fields. We offer insights from another case of individuals taking PPE into their own hands. We analyse patents for women’s motoring face masks invented in America, Canada, England, and France (1900 -1925). Our findings suggest that women invented and wore face masks not only to drive safely, but to position themselves as legitimate motorists and as citizens with equal rights to technology, public space, and resources at the turn of last century. We propose that a study of historic motoring face masks might offer insights into persistent problems and inventive possibilities relating to contemporary PPE.

Key words: citizenship, gender, invention, masks, motoring, patent, PPE, resistance

Abstract: This article contributes to Science and Technology Studies (STS) literatures on ‘making and doing’ by describing and analysing the practice of researching, reconstructing, and reimagining archival clothing patent data. It combines feminist speculation and reconstruction practices into what I term ‘speculative sewing’. This involves stitching data, theory and fabric into inventions described in patents and analysing them as three-dimensional arguments. In the case here, of 1890s British women’s convertible cycle wear, I examine how inventors used new forms of clothing to challenge socio-political restrictions on women’s bodies in public space and help them make alternate claims to rights and entitlements. I argue that translating text and images into wearable data renders lesser-known technoscience stories visible and (more) knowable and transforms clothing (back) into material matters of public concern.

Keywords: clothing, inventions, making and doing, reconstructions, sewing, citizenship

Abstract: This is a blog post for a special issue of The Sociological Review magazine on the theme of Clothes.

On 9 September 1895, Alice Worthington Winthrop of Washington, DC filed a patent for the simply titled “Bicycle Skirt”, yet it was anything but ordinary (Fig. 1). An advertisement in the Indianapolis Journal explained “the peculiar advantages” of the skirt. It was “adaptable to various kinds of athleticism, bicycling, golfing and mountaineering”. It provided generous “freedom of motion” and was especially accommodating for women wanting to ride a man’s bicycle, which had a top bar, instead of a step-through bicycle designed for heavy layered skirts. Men’s machines were lighter and faster, while ladies’ bicycles were renowned for being heavier, and combined with layers of clothing, much harder and hotter to ride. Moreover, the Winthrop, as it was known, could be used without it appearing “noticeably different from the skirt generally worn” by middle and upper-class women in the Global North.

How did one bicycle skirt do all this?

The secret lay inside.

Abstract: This article is about clothing inventions, material participation, and acts of citizenship. I explore how pioneering Victorian women at the turn of last century inventively responded via clothing to restrictions to their (physical and ideological) freedom of movement. While the bicycle is typically celebrated as a primary vehicle of women’s emancipation at that time, I argue that inventive forms of clothing, such as convertible cycling skirts, also helped women make claims to rights and privileges otherwise legally denied to their sex. I ask: Do clothing inventions create possibilities to act differently? Can they be thought of as wearable technology, and in what ways do they (and their invention) enact political concerns? Might convertible cycling skirts be considered “acts of citizenship?” Throughout, I mobilize concepts of multiplicity, in-betweenness, and ambiguity to make a case for the relevance of clothing research for science and technology studies.

Keywords: citizenship, clothing, gender, invention, patents, participation

SI overview: As DIY digital maker culture proliferates globally, research on these practices is also maturing. Still, particular terminologies dominate beyond their Western contexts, and technocultural histories of making are often rendered as over-simplified technomyths that render invisible diverse local practices. This special issue brings together contributions that highlight how historicising plays a role in mythmaking and the creation of social imaginaries. These peer-reviewed articles present cultural-historical perspectives, technology and design histories and historiographies, and alternative histories related to postcolonial resistance. The contributions illustrate the relevance of craft to making as a reparative practice after the Salvadoran Civil War and as a leisure activity to spark »innovation« in mid-century corporate culture; the political-economic background to the diffusion and differentiation of community workshops in contemporary Spain and post-war Germany; and the various aesthetics and politics of technology culture manifestos over the years.

This special issue features six short alternative (hi)stories of DIY making including multiple practices, geographies and temporalities.

Stitch. Thread. Unpick. Unravel. Seam. Interface. Piece. Cut. Fold. Pin. Press. Gather. We use a surprising number of sewing terms in everyday language. They are particularly present in the doing of social research. We unpick concepts, thread ideas through arguments and stitch theory together with methods. We combine materials, and fold and press data into shape. We are trained to look for patterns, find holes in arguments and try to mend them. Language matters as much as the clothes that cover our bodies. Both are cultural, social, gendered, and political. They hold memories and make meaning. They shape how we interact, respond, know each other and ourselves. They materialise class, race, gender, and environmental norms and beliefs as well as offering means to protest and resist them. Yet, these words, and the many methods they describe, can become so familiar in their underpinning of everyday practice that we cease to notice them. As many researchers in STS have pointed out, paying attention to mundane and everyday objects and practices can cast new light on conventional or accepted socio-political norms and beliefs and raise questions about things we take for granted. In this chapter I focus on speculative sewing – the stitching together of data, theory, methods, and fabric into three dimensional arguments. I aim to describe how the process thickens data by rendering lesser-known research stories visible and knowable.