Skill Share: Constructing the social

The ‘social’ is constantly being constructed, capitalist’s principles of exclusion, competition and scarcity, are currently the formative forces structuring our social reality. How can we shift that paradigm? The course will explore models of teaching and learning for empowerment and how skills can be traded and bartered to build, sustain and amplify communities, re-locating agency, supporting values, like respect, abundance, and response-ability. Challenging current notions of success and value, the course sets out to re-value the worth of skills, sharing and collaborative co-creation to make better use of the human capital we have abundantly available to us. One of the tools we will focus on, is clear and effective communication skills. Students will re-examine the history of the Shakers and other craft communities, the journeyman traditions of trades and transferable operational models for training outside the regimes of capitalist education and consumption.

Critical fashion and social justice

Fashion is a phenomenon thriving on social injustice, and where there are few social differences it produces them, harvesting its energy from the frictions of social competition. The course will explore topics from the technologies of the self and cultural identity, global production and consumption, body size and regimes of asceticism, aesthetic apartheid and politics of the dressed body. Specifically the course will juxtapose the struggles of social justice with the injustices amplified by fashion to draw parallels and find new tactics for empowerment through fashion, that is, how fashion can mitigate injustice and produce engagement and craft capabilities, or in other words, making people fashion-able.