Rosie Hancock 0:05
Hi, this is Uncommon Sense from the Sociological Review Foundation. I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney, Australia.
Alexis Hieu Truong 0:12
And I'm Alexis Hieu Truong in Ottawa, Canada.
Rosie Hancock 0:15
And - as you'll hopefully know by now - the show's about taking words and ideas we think we know and then flipping them. Aiming to see them more critically and ultimately to see our society differently - all with the idea that we will communicate what it means to think sociologically, in the broadest sense.
Alexis Hieu Truong 0:33
Yeah. And today, we're looking at the idea of 'making'. A word that might lead us to think about all sorts of things from design, to reproduction - and what sociologists call social reproduction too I guess - to craft, to creation. I mean - like -even religion, which is your field, right, Rosie?
Rosie Hancock 0:52
Yeah, I mean, there's a really live debate in this kind of studies of religion broadly about whether we actually invented, we made the concept of religion ourselves. But - you know - more generally, I think it's this idea of making is very heavily gendered, and also sometimes belittled. Like, it's relegated to the realm of hobbies. But then - you know - there are other times when it becomes valorised and commodified - things like architecture and urban development, or the marketing of artisanal products. It seems like some makers, or some kinds of making, get celebrated. But then others aren't even given the label at all, which, which really leads us to the question of what is making? So, Alexis - with that in mind, I'll ask - do you see yourself as a maker in the conventional sense? I dabble in a bit of sewing and DIY, but I do know I've seen some music kit in the background of your little Zoom window when we record.
Alexis Hieu Truong 1:51
Rosie, I do love to make stuff. But most of the time, I think I'm just like taking things apart. When I was a kid - you know - every chance I got, I took a screwdriver and opened up my toys to see how they worked. And in my adult life, I tried a bit of circuit bending, which is like, basically you take toys, you rewire them, to make weird sounds for music. So, yes, love that kind of playing around with, with making things.
Rosie Hancock 2:21
Well, with those ideas on the table, or perhaps the workbench, we're glad to have a guest who's going to help us see making differently. She's a sociologist, Kat Jungnickel based at Goldsmiths in London. She's into the role of technologies in relation to bodies, gender and DIY cultures. And she's curious about how people radically reinvent and reimagine social political worlds using mundane and ordinary things.
Alexis Hieu Truong 2:47
Hi Kat, it's good to have you here joining us. I believe from a pretty idyllic setting in Australia - actually - at the time of this recording. So, we'll forgive any echo on your side, as I understand you've closed the windows to keep out the sounds of bird life. Anyway, a quick question to get us started: what, off the top of your head, is the last thing you made before sitting down to join us?
Kat Jungnickel 3:11
I made some coffee, very specifically. But I think when I think about making - myself - I made a dress a few days ago. So I do a lot of sewing. And when I can, I do a lot of sewing for personal pleasure, even though I'm increasingly doing quite a lot of sewing for work as well.
Rosie Hancock 3:29
So - I mean - do you consider yourself a maker then, since you do all of this sewing and other sorts of craft? I mean, do you do other sorts of crafts as well?
Kat Jungnickel 3:39
Absolutely. You know, I've always been interested in and curious about making. My mum, like many people I'm sure, taught me to sew, and I've been making and mending my clothes for most of my life. I had maintained and built up quite a lot of the bicycles that I ride - not the frames as yet, I'd love to do that. But I've certainly done lots of things of stuff that goes on to bikes. I love to garden - you know - making green spaces in very small places that I've lived. Definitely done a bit of DIY in my time - you know - and it's mostly worked out. But I also like to take things apart, mostly I can put them back together again, but I've certainly used my bike tools and my sewing machines to fix things. And I've increasingly incorporated - you know - making into my research. You know, I've really brought lots of the things that I love into the things that I do for work. And it's, you know, it's gained even more and more presence to the point where I've actually been called a 'sewing cycling sociologist'. So I'm basically a sociologist who likes to make stuff, I think.
Alexis Hieu Truong 4:41
And Kat, we'll come to some of your earlier work soon. But can you introduce us to, like your more recent work on cycling, fashion and invention? You wrote your book 'Bikes and Bloomers' back in 2018 and then expanded that into a project on politics of patents or POP as it's known.
Kat Jungnickel 4:59
Yes. It's been about a decade of work that has been developing to the project that I'm doing now. But yes, it started with 'Bikes and Bloomers'. I started sociologically sewing on that project. And it was all about feminist cultures of invention and gender and new tech, and the changing nature of citizenship in public space in late 19th century Britain. And in that I explore a very small period of English history, looking really deeply at about 10 years of clothing inventions, from 1890 to 1900. And it's basically a story of how women - as cyclists - were also inventors and makers and hackers. Basically, they were responding to barriers to their freedom of movement by inventing radical new forms of convertible cycling, cyclewear to ride their bikes. Building on that, I'm now doing a project called 'Politics of Patents' - or POP for short - that's funded by European Research Council consolidator grant. And we've a team of sewing social scientists now - which is very exciting - we get to explore 200 years of clothing inventions from 1820 to 2020. And that's in the global patent archives. And we get to reconstruct a collection of garments in this project as well. And in this project - and in pretty much 'Bikes and Bloomers' too, but this is much bigger - we're exploring how if clothing inventions can be read as acts of political resistance, and what kind of citizens are made possible or reimagined through clothing inventions. Because both projects use patented archives, they use ethnographic methods, and what I call speculative sewing, which stitches data, theory and fabric into inventions described in patents, and then we analyse them as three dimensional arguments. And throughout, we ask - you know - what, what emerges from making that we wouldn't have learned from just reading the patent. So, we find it really exciting in the fact that we're diving into the past to make connections with - you know - questions that are being asked still today about - you know - freedom of movement, about kind of clothing that enables people to - kind of like - make, take or claim public space and different restrictions that are still on people around the world in terms of what they can and cannot, cannot wear. But, you know, a lot of my work - even you know, for the 'Bikes and Bloomers' project and since - has been about an interest in the making of sociological arguments in multi dimensional forms - you know - so I've done websites and a little bit of performance. I've done installations and exhibitions. And most recently, I've moved into reconstructions of historic costume.
Rosie Hancock 7:31
That's so cool. And this research, it fits into a field known as STS that stands for Science and Technology Studies. Can you tell us - I mean - what it is as a field, but also what it's got to do with sociology?
Kat Jungnickel 7:45
Yeah, so STS. It's a really big interdisciplinary field of study, which basically explores how Science and Technology co- evolves with and in society. How it shapes and is shaped by the world around it. So, it's very broad. But that's partially - I think - why I like it, because it includes so many diverse topics. But at its core is the idea that science and technology are never neutral. You know, they're never separate, never independent from society, culture, politics or history. And - you know - it's really important to explore and understand the broader influences and impacts and entanglements of - you know - about these things that are so prevalent. Technology is kind of everywhere, depending on - of course - how you define it. I would define clothing as technology. But most people would probably think of digital tech, but it is everywhere. So it helps us ask questions about why we have the science and tech we have today. It helps us better understand where they come from, why they take the forms they do and also how they might have been otherwise. You know, how we might imagine them differently in the future. So all of this maps on pretty well to sociological ideas, about the sociological imagination and questions about class and gender and race.
Rosie Hancock 8:57
Yeah. I mean, I know that there's this idea of 'the black box'. And I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about that.
Kat Jungnickel 9:05
Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the concepts that I've used quite a bit in my research. Bruno Latour - and many like him - have talked about how technology is often made invisible, when it becomes widely successful and accepted and part of everyday life. It looks really smooth and seamless from the outside. And yet lots of decisions and assumptions - you know - and stereotypes even are built into how it's made and used, you know. But getting inside the black box is a way of getting under the surface, about pulling it apart, about investigating all the - you know - individual and interconnecting pieces. And then we can follow them in different directions. And it can be really revealing and take you on unexpected journeys with your research.
Alexis Hieu Truong 9:47
And when it comes to sociology more broadly, what reverence has 'making' typically been afforded? And how has it been defined? Like, I'm sensing that there's this, there's been a historical snobbishness whereby speech and thought have been privileged.
Kat Jungnickel 10:03
Yeah, absolutely. You know, research and sociology more broadly has always been about making - you know - it's a creative and it's critical practice with a huge array of methods at its core. You know, constructing arguments is all about making. We craft ideas, we create projects. And when we share findings, we're making connections, right, between ideas and things and questions, and - you know - all the people who are involved in our research, as well as who are audiences for it, you know. And as many have argued, like John Law and John Urry - you know - research doesn't just reflect or describe society, it's also world making. So what our work does is also constructing realities. So every method that we use furnishes new ways of seeing and understanding the world. So making is everywhere, and it's central. However - as you say - saying that, some forms of making have certainly kind of privileged over others and have long been privileged over others. When I first started out, sociology was much more oriented to text and spoken word - you know - really highly valued those outputs. And in many ways - you know - academia still does in terms of the importance of journal articles and books for promotion and grants, etc. But there are many other ways of making sociological arguments that engage and involve - you know - diverse groups and have, you know, amazing kind of outputs and circulation. And making means lots of different things to lots of different people. You know, for me, in my research, I give talks and I write. But my work takes all kinds of different dimensionality. You know, I often talk about making things to make sense of things, which for me recognises the importance of research in practice, and practice in research.
Rosie Hancock 11:46
I mean, we've just been talking about - sort of - the ways in which doing sociology is a form of making in and of itself. But I'm wondering about sort of how making is labelled and celebrated within mainstream culture, and whether there's a similar sort of narrow - I should say, like, typically narrow - vision, and what that might obscure? So like, the people who died in the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, or the factory labourers who make our clothes. Are they makers? And who is deciding? Is it sociologists and academics? Is it like, who's deciding who the makers are? Who studies those people? And why is this kind of discussion important?
Kat Jungnickel 12:32
Yeah, I think it's incredibly important, you know. And when we think about clothing and making - you know - I think a lot about clothing in the process of making my own clothes and also in the study of historic clothing cultures. You know, what we wear is both incredibly ordinary, but fantastically extraordinary. You know, it's essential and it's critical, it's really valuable. But it's also so easy to overlook, to cast away and under appreciate. When you sew something, it takes a really long time. You know, much longer than most people might realise. Yet fast fashion is a major problem, as you've kind of pointed to. And throw away culture is endemic, you know, and this rapidly fills up toxic landfills. And people, as you say - you know - these makers who are phenomenally good at sewing, who make things at top speed, in often terrible conditions with really low pay, get ignored or exploited. You know, they're the kind of makers who are completely intrinsic to the clothes that many of us wear, and yet somehow they're not recognised in this kind of valorization of particular forms of making. It's definitely a blind spot in the world of making. But there's also lots of researchers who've dedicated their careers to highlighting and showcasing not just - you know - factory workers, but also sewers and makers, whose small businesses might be like economic, you know, backbones and success stories on local if not national, or even international levels. But they just don't get the the attention they deserve, as you said a little bit earlier, compared to other industries. You know, in the UK and Europe, I'm thinking about here of Angela McRobbie's work, she's doing fantastic work on pointing out the incredible financial contributions that cultural industries make. And also in Australia, the work of like Natalya Lusty and Harriet Richards are doing similar things.
Rosie Hancock 14:19
I'm wondering, whether we can say that - in a way - the vast majority of us, are really makers now. You know, irrespective of whether we engage in hobbies or something like that. So, we're all feeding algorithms. We're feeding ChatGPT. You know, the smart devices that we are led to believe, empowering us. You know, if this is the case, can we say that there are - in a way - both good and bad types of making? Like maybe some of those things are not good types of making that we're engaged in?
Kat Jungnickel 14:53
Yeah, I think it's really interesting - isn't it - the ways in which different forms of data are being used and scraped and harvested. And - you know - I think it's really interesting to ask are these good or bad forms of making? I kind of, often, just challenge kind of the binaries of those, of course - you know - as we do within research. But I, you know, I was teaching privacy and surveillance studies for such, quite a long time before I started to do this full time research. And within that, we're always having these discussions about what we do with our data. And what that does, you know. We freely give away a lot of our data on a daily basis. And as, but as researchers and sociologists - you know - I'm sure we're quite happy to contribute to large scale data collection, like the Census, for example, or to NHS health surveys. But sometimes when we get very little choice and get very little opportunity to consent when our data is taken from us, and then gets bought and sold by large scale firms who then use it for profit, it becomes - you know - differently problematic. Especially when we become makers of our own algorithmic kind of echo chambers. And as we've been seeing, kind of more and more recently, it seems to be generating more division than unity. So that's a little bit free flowing. But I think - yes, I think this notion that we all might be considered makers, if you think about the fact that we are, many of us, are content creating, you know, to a lesser or greater degree. And that kind of data is getting very similar, if not larger, audiences than more mainstream forms of broadcast and communication.
Alexis Hieu Truong 16:27
So we're getting here at questions of power, inequality and resistance, or maybe the impossibility of. But sticking to our discussion - just now - of why it's important to attend to making, could you actually rewind and tell us about your doctoral research, which you did in Australia. I understand it was about people making their own Wi-Fi?
Kat Jungnickel 16:49
My PhD was a really fantastic experience - you know - in amongst all the incredible amounts of work, of course. But I had an opportunity to explore people who were hackers and digital tinkerers, who were building their own version of the internet, pretty much in their backyards. I did ethnographic research with a group who were building a kind of a - you know - a Wi Fi network across all of their rooftops in suburban Australia. And they were using off-the-shelf tech, as well as a lot of chicken wire and tin cans and sticky tape. So very inventive kind of practice. I spent a lot of time on rooftops, making and repairing things with them. But while I was there, I also fell in with another hacking group that tangled into the study, which is the nature often of ethnographic research. And they were a bike, bike hacking group. And again, they were using a whole range of accessible tech but turning it into something else. So, they were using things they found in rubbish piles - old bicycles, they cut them up, they re-welded them back into bike-shaped objects. And they pushed at the edges of what - you know - a bicycle was or could be. You know, questioning why it looked the way it did, how might it work if you add more wheels, and made it bigger or added more people onto it. And what I came to kind of think with in these both, both projects was that both groups were able, were really making a thing, remaking a thing that already existed, by hacking it to do something beyond that which the initial designer might have intended. And by doing that, they were starting to create alternative worlds - you know - and different forms, where different forms of consumption might be possible. So these are the things that I found really exciting and I started to think even more about different forms of inventiveness. And that's where my new project kind of emerged from.
Alexis Hieu Truong 18:36
And you talk about DIY and DIT, which means do it together, yeah? Can you explain what those terms mean, in the context of that project, specifically? And also more broadly?
Kat Jungnickel 18:48
Yeah, I think very rarely do people - you know - do DIY on their own. Even when you are doing it individually, independently, you are, you are building on and drawing from - you know - a whole range of tools that have been made, different processes, different systems of practice. And obviously, you know, the way in which we do DIY now, there is so much incredible information online to follow. People are being incredibly generous. So I think DIY, in a way, is always DIT, do it together. But in my experience of doing those two projects, they were really do it together. Groups of people came together, to build things, to share tools, to offer advice, to enjoy and delight in the things that we were collectively making. And sometimes things, things just couldn't be made by one person. You needed two people to hold things or to ride things or to fix things.
Rosie Hancock 19:42
I mean, what you're describing here seems - like - so antithetical to the sort of mainstream ideas of production that we have within capitalism. This idea of being able to - you know - there's no bad mistakes, or we can fix it, or we can make it into something else. We're going to do this together. We're gonna sit outside these sort of mainstream supply chains as much as you can. So do you think that this do it together that you're describing, way of making, is a rejection of capitalism or a rebellion of some kind?
Kat Jungnickel 20:16
Yeah, I think for some people, it probably totally is. For others, it's a way of kind of dealing with the, the cost of living crisis. You know, there's a way of building community, there's a way of having online digital community. You know, there's lots of - you know - really interesting groups popping up that share tools. That share spaces to kind of do this kind of work. That just have these digital - yep - just distribution models, whereby, you know, they showcase different ways of making things that you can just access for free. I think there's lots of this absolutely happening. But everyone's probably got very different motivations for how - you know - actively rebellious or resistant this is to capitalism. But I think at its core - yeah - I think this is how I see, as exciting, parallel possibilities there are in the world.
Rosie Hancock 21:07
And, I mean, what works against these types of practices? So - by which, I mean - why isn't there more of this? More collaboration, more sharing, more co-creation. Is, are the conditions of so many of our lives just not able to permit this kind of thing? I mean, is it a failure of imagination? Of not knowing what's, what's possible? Or maybe is it more structural?
Kat Jungnickel 21:31
Yeah, I've thought about this a lot, because I really like to do all of these things, and then sometimes just don't. And I just think - well - why, why am I not participating in all of this, if I already know this exists, and I've done this, and I don't have many the pressures that other people do with really large families, or, you know, different forms of caring responsibilities. But it does come down to all sorts of other things that take over in your life. You know, for me, you know, this is about time and space. You know, and my current life, - you know, in, you know - living in a in a big city is that I don't have a lot of, either time gets taken up with a lot of work and space is at a premium. And those two things I find are really difficult for, even if you've got the other privileges of having that as a choice to participate in. So, yeah - for me - it's as basic as that. As for other people it can be incredibly much more complex with many other kinds of pressures on them in terms of just the hierarchies that need to take priority over that kind of thing. And so therefore - you know, do you spend a couple of days make, making a new garment? Or do you just go down and buy it, you know, for, you know, a third of the price, if not even less. And for, you know, a fraction of the time. You can see why those choices get made.
Alexis Hieu Truong 21:31
Even considering like these obstacle to participating in creation - like - it's like much of your work is really interested in, in problem solving. Whether the doctoral work, or that on cycling, fashion and patterns. I was wondering, can we bring in, like, Donna Haraway, here on the idea of staying with the trouble? And like, I guess I'm thinking here, how, like your work has involved really puzzling things out. Including - I understand - like getting to know the literal ins and outs of a buttonhole. So maybe there's an anecdote also here.
Kat Jungnickel 23:23
So, in terms of staying with the trouble, we definitely try and do that within the POP project. And staying with the trouble - you know - really means to be attentive to the ethical and moral responsibility of an issue. You know, it's about taking account of the impacts of those around, of the places, the people, the things, the animals, the environment, more. And just not shying away from things that don't seem to work, or seem a bit difficult or a bit uncomfortable, or increasingly - you know - are difficult to make sense of. So, I see that as - you know - it's about staying with the trouble. But also about making trouble as needed. And I think a lot of the inventors that I've been studying were doing this. You know, they're attempting to address social and political problems through clothing. They're, they're working with - and also against - these barriers. You know, working around them in many sense. But they're really trying to enable wearers to make claim or take space and rights and entitlements that they, otherwise were denied them. And sometimes they're doing it in fairly wild and rebellious ways. Often they're hidden in plain sight, but they were certainly kind of enabling wearers to - you know - have these opportunities that otherwise might have been denied them.
Rosie Hancock 24:37
I feel like this is a really interesting example - perhaps - of the way, you know, technology becomes invisible. Because I don't think for a second about the fact that I can just stride out of my house and jog or jump on my bike or anything like that - and that my clothes just freely allow me to do that. I totally take my clothing for granted in that respect. We're going to build on more of that soon. But first a quick word from our producer Alice and we'll be back in a second.
Alice Bloch 25:11
Hi, thanks for joining us to hear Kat Jungnickel talking about making and makers. We're well into season three of 'Uncommon Sense' now and hope this podcast is a valuable resource. Whether you're listening for pleasure, work or study. If you've headed over to thesociologicalreview.org, maybe to check out our show notes or our other podcasts, you might have seen that the Sociological Review Foundation is a charity. We're all about advancing public understanding of sociology and you could say that in 2024, we need that more than ever. And so we've a favour to ask. If you can, please consider making a contribution to help the foundation keep bringing this podcast to you. Just head to donorbox.org/uncommon-sense. That's donorbox.org/uncommon-sense. You can find and click on that link by scrolling our show notes too. There you can make one off or repeat donations to directly support the making of 'Uncommon Sense', all gratefully received. And of course, we're also glad to have you simply listening in. Any feedback or suggestions, write to us at uncommonsense@thesociologicalreview.org. Thanks for listening.
Rosie Hancock 26:22
Okay, so here's where we'd like to ask you about a thinker who's provided you with a bit of uncommon sense, who inspires you to think differently about your work and your subject. Previously, on the show, we've celebrated people like the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, and the post-colonial thinker and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon.
Alexis Hieu Truong 26:46
Kat, I understand you want to talk about Saidiya Hartman, who is currently based in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University in the US. And you want to talk - in particular - about her book 'Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments’, which came out about like five years ago. Can you tell us about that book, what it's looking at and what - kind of - it achieves?
Kat Jungnickel 27:10
Yeah. Hartman has written a number of fantastic books and 'Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments' - I think - is one of my favourites. Because she really brings to life - you know - stories of young black women trying to carve out independent and spirited lives in America during the 1890s. There's not much in the archives about them and what is there, it's deviant and dismissive. It labels them as criminals. So, she does something called 'critical fabulation', she weaves together partial and fragmented historic data with critical theory and fictional narrative. And in doing this, she really beautifully reimagines their lives as they might have done. You know, full of life and joy and spirited adventure, open to experimental forms of living, queer and free. And it's really powerful, because it credibly challenges the authority of historical data and the power of archives. So, with her work, she reads against the grain, you know, and which she says, disturbs and breaks open stories. So, she makes a place for these women in history and in historical records, which otherwise has denied them a voice. And I find that really inspiring for the work that I'm doing in investigating - you know - groups of inventors who otherwise - well in different ways, but - have you know, had been silenced and have been overlooked or under appreciated? You know, and I'm trying to recover them.
Rosie Hancock 28:33
In a September 2022 piece for the Sociological Review magazine, the feminist sociologist Gala Rexer celebrated 'Wayward Lives'. And it's worth noting here, that part of the documentation and the archives that is drawn on is sociological field notes themselves. And something that really comes across for me in Gala's piece is the huge responsibility we have as researchers to see writing - so the creation and making of narratives, I guess - as high stakes, as something that really matters. And I wonder if you could elaborate on that for us?
Kat Jungnickel 29:11
Yeah, I think that was a really interesting piece. You know. I like how they question the role of historical sociology in making the categories, the accounts and stories that label particular groups of people. You know, such as what Hartman is writing against. You know, I think we have incredibly important roles as sociologists to continually question that which has gone before us as well as what we're contributing and putting into the world. You know, the sociological canon is not this untouchable force. Much like the tech that I kind of talked about earlier, it needs to be always critically questioned about how much you know, it was shaped by social, cultural and political forces at the time. And also how we might continually - kind of - keep reshaping and remaking it to make it really relevant and useful. And I like how Rexer really writes about refusal and repair, you know as tactics of reparation.
Alexis Hieu Truong 30:00
As you mentioned, right, that piece also acknowledges that sociologists have been involved in producing, creating, making and bolstering harmful categories. So we're not always just like benign makers, which is something we should - I guess - keep in mind.
Kat Jungnickel 30:17
Yeah, I'm really conscious of that and I think that's why I find work like Hartman's really inspiring. Because, you know, she really draws attention to the gaps and the silences in the archives. And although she does incredibly creative - kind of - powerful work in reimagining, you know, the lives that aren't recorded, she still makes those gaps and silences really visible and notable. She doesn't try and smooth that over in any way. She really draws attention to those things, highlighting those as massive - kind of like - critical and almost problems and acts of violence as such, in the fact that they're there. And in my work - in much kind of smaller ways - you know, I've been looking for, you know, women inventors who otherwise have been largely rendered invisible. You know, unless they were notoriously wealthy, or really badly behaved, or labelled deviant they feature little, if any, in any historical record. You know, when they do they tend to be written about by others and then it's really partial, fragmented, or written - you know - satirically or worse. You know, and riddled with errors - it's amazing how many errors there are. But even when they do amazing things - you know - such as they get patented, and they - you know - get successful distribution and commercialization, their lives are very rarely covered with the same heroic tones, volumes or details as their male counterparts. Because, you know, what they've been patenting hasn't been recognised. As we were talking before about even clothing today, still, in many cases gets overlooked and underappreciated. Then as well - you know - patenting, you know, a really remarkable convertible skirt is still, you know, at that time - and even you would argue today - not a bridge. And not, you know, not, you know, another huge, you know, important piece of tech. So, what I'm trying to do in this way is to find and understand and piece together all these fragments - stitch them together, if you will - into it into another kind of archive, and another way of thinking about the history that might help to think about why we don't know about lots of these stories. How we might ask different questions, look into the archives and be able to build on these ideas rather than think of them just as these - either never think about them, or think of them as anomalous, rather than this long and evolving, really powerful history that has gotten us to where we are today. But I'm also very conscious of the fact that I'm not trying to smooth over. I'm not trying to say - you know there's a really smooth and easy to find, or that I've even found these perfect stories. What I'm trying to do is just piece enough together in order to be able to tell some of these stories and to ask different questions about where we are today and why.
Rosie Hancock 33:01
It sounds a lot like the sort of method that you're talking about, that you're using in your projects and these archives, and also what Hartman is doing as well - there's such a strong resonance with what we were talking about right at the beginning of the show. About how you and Alexis really liked pulling things apart, and then putting them back together again. That there's this really nice, you know, synergy between how we're talking about this crafting, taking things apart, putting them back together, and the process that you're using. But that - you know - in this context, you're really trying to, in that process of putting things back together, you're doing it quite purposefully in order to address sort of the gaps and the silences that were there. And I wondered if you had just any reflections on that?
Kat Jungnickel 33:49
Yeah, thank you for that. You know, there's been a lot of people who've written about - you know - lots of feminist techno-scientists have written about the contributions that women have made in the past, you know. Just because they don't appear very firmly or strongly in the archives doesn't mean that they weren't there. You know, like Ruth Schwartz Cowan has written about the absence of female perspectives - and the available histories of technology was a function of the historians who write them and not historical reality. So, my form of care and repair is to find and show and tell about their contributions. So by remaking - you know - their lesser known contributions, by reconstructing a lot of these incredible costumes, and showing them. But I often perform their stories while in costume and demonstrate - you know - the, their extraordinary potential and capacity for conversion. You know, by following these women step by step instructions, by remaking these artefacts, we're creating objects which in their multi dimensionality are difficult to ignore. You know, they're hard to overlook - and that's kind of a political act on my behalf. They become more of a force to be reckoned with, as you know, then perhaps just an archival document.
Rosie Hancock 35:08
I love that care and repair that you just said. I think about that ethos in terms of how I relate to kind of material artefacts in a kind of like an ecological ethics kind of way. But I've never thought about it in terms of how you might go about doing sociology. So thanks, that was really great. Finally, Kat, it's that bit of the show where we grab a pop culture tip from you for something that speaks to our theme. Before we do that, though, we wanted to ask just generally about the trend - I know it's in the UK, there's a bit of it here in Australia as well - for shows that celebrate making. So famously the Great British Bake Off - I mean, in Australia, we have the MasterChef kind of cooking equivalent. But I have heard there's also ones about woodwork and sewing and ceramics.
Alexis Hieu Truong 35:50
Kat, what do you think that's all about? Like, these kinds of shows are branded as entertainment. But can we see any kind of radical, critical, or - I guess - sociological potential in them?
Kat Jungnickel 36:01
Yeah, I think they're incredibly popular because there is this incredible curiosity about making. You know, about where things come from. Or rather, there's just people would like to have - I think - more time to actually engage in, you know, the behind the scenes things, even if they can't do it. And this is a way of consuming that making, even if you can't participate in it. I personally find the Great British Bake Off really relaxing to watch. I can actually watch people burn cakes and then go to sleep really soundly afterwards. Whereas I can't do that with the, with the sewing shows. I get a little bit stressed watching people having to put a buttonhole in with like five seconds to go. So, I think we all have our different ways of orienting, orienting to these different shows. But I think they are incredibly popular because there is this completely kind of hidden world in these objects that surround us. That - you know - I haven't studied this, but for myself, you know, I want to know what's behind them, or how to piece them together or develop the skills that maybe - at some point - I might be able to engage more inside the black box of these objects.
Rosie Hancock 37:07
So if we were going to push you for a recommendation to throw into our show notes, one that allows us to think about making beyond the academic context, what would it be?
Kat Jungnickel 37:18
Well it kind of relates to that, because I'm actually in awe of the culture of home sewers. You know, I'm talking specifically about people who make and share their sewing process and practice as well as the images of finished pieces online. You know, they also help others who get stuck, they provide step by step instructions, and you know, videos, and inspire people how to adapt and rework designs. You know, I discovered this incredible world of makers when I made a range of patterns from the patents - you know - that we'd been researching, and published them online as open access, you know, downloadable PDF sewing packs. And they included information about the inventors and their inventions. And it was a bit of an experiment as a research output. But I was really amazed by the, by the results. Like, they're still being downloaded now from the project and we probably launched the first six about five years ago. But I think they've been downloaded about 75,000 times all over the world. And people have generously made step-by-step videos and photographs of, of them making these patterns and shared them with other people. And were much better than the things that we were providing at the time, because this is new to us. And people send us pics of their finished garments and they have often hacked them to do new things. So they've maybe done historical costumes, but they've also put some of the inventions into their contemporary clothes. And they sometimes turn up to my talks in research costumes. So, I think the subculture of home sewing is amazing. And I also just think sewing is a superpower.
Rosie Hancock 38:54
That's amazing. I sometimes, I love digging into sort of sewing YouTube videos. But I've never, I've never gone that far. So that sounds like a very cool subculture. Well, that's it for today. Kat, thank you so much for your time, we've had a great time chatting to you.
Kat Jungnickel 39:13
Thank you very much.
Alexis Hieu Truong 39:14
And we're all done for today. But you can catch today's show notes, including a great reading list with pieces from the Sociological Review, plus the various thinkers we discussed today, by digging into the 'Uncommon Sense' section on the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org.
Rosie Hancock 39:33
And given our theme I also want to plug the 'Image-maker in Residence' section over on that same site. It's our monthly showcase of creative work, by practitioners from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, and it puts visual sociology in the spotlight. Next month we're sticking with making as we turn to coffee culture, talking to Grazia Ting Deng about her book 'Chinese Espresso'.
Alexis Hieu Truong 39:56
Our producer was Alice Bloch and our sound engineer was Dave Crackles. Thanks for listening. Bye.
