Since 2012, the Collective has been consistently developing an extensive network of people and communities and contributing to engaging conversations, disruptive scholarship and inspiring publications. The RCDF Annual Report 2022 presents an overview of the activities, conversations, presentations, collaborations and publications convened by and with the RCDF in the course of 2022.
Each of the activities is in line with our vision to work towards a politics of redress, a politics of aesthetic and epistemic restitution and repair, a politics of transitioning from a logic of representation and owning that is key to contemporary fashion to a logic of reception and owing and a politics of giving back a place in the present, of hosting and emplacing what has been denied and erased.
As a way of rethinking our founding academic conferences, the Non-Western Fashion Conference (Rabat 2012, London 2013, Hong Kong 2014, Antwerp 2016 and Tokyo 2019), we initiated the monthly online Conversations on Decoloniality & Fashion in February 2021. Free of academic gatekeeping, geographical boundaries and visa restrictions, this shared space for reflection, (un)learning and repair continued in 2022 with ten Conversations, each with a different topic, guest(s) and selected materials.
After transitioning from an informal network to a not-for-profit foundation registered in the Netherlands in October 2021, we initiated our first Annual General Meeting 2021 (AGM21) in December 2021 as an opportunity for the community to connect, reflect and project.
As a decentral and decolonial alternative for international (academic) gatherings, we initiated the Global Fashioning Assembly (GFA22) in October 2022. This online live streamed and recorded gathering followed the sun on its course around the world. As it moved from one time zone to the next, the hosting of the GFA was passed on from one community to the next, with a multi-stakeholder programme combining online and offline formats. With guests becoming hosts and hosts becoming guests, the GFA is aimed at disrupting conventional colonial power relations often at play in global projects.
The Collective continues to share its experiences, knowledge-creation and networks through presentations, blog posts, newsletters, podcasts and publications. In October 2022, a special issue of the International Journal for Fashion Studies was published on ‘Decolonizing Fashion (Studies) as process,’ guest edited by Sarah Cheang, Leslie Rabine and Arti Sandhu.
Download the full report here.
Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion 