Confirmed speakers to include Fritz Horstman from Anni Albers Foundation, scholar Michael Beggs, artist-educator Christy Matson, artist and advocate Porfirio Gutierrez, educator and faculty Emily Silver, innovative material specialist Kristine Upesleja, and more to be announced.

Our interest in textiles comes at a time of profound alienation from their means of production. In the West, many have little idea where the fiber that makes their clothes comes from, much less the labor, energy, carbon, and water necessary to produce them. Parallels between computers and weaving are almost trite, but never more true. We are living at a time of the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, itself an alienation from computation, and the resources it requires. In both cases production is outsourced to a “cloud,” and in both cases that “cloud” is typically located in a poor and under-privileged neighborhood (in the US) or a developing nation, enabling the exploiting of labor and the environment. By thinking through these parallel histories together, we gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of contemporary global capitalism, its history, and how Indigenous and craft practices provide modes of resistance and knowledges of ways forward into a world threatened by the environmental and human casualties of Anthropocene.

Learning to make and work with textiles shifts our minds from the abstraction of screens and networks, of thinking only with the eyes, and engages our thoughts on systems of production, material histories embedded in practices and tools, and thinking with and through the hands about the concrete reality in which we live.

The history of textiles indexes the history of capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and globalization. Nearly every step in the development of modern capitalism, the slave trade, colonization, industrialization, and offshoring is tied up with the insatiable development of manufactured textiles at the expense of local and Indigenous, often women-led, making practices. The Industrial Revolution in England was primarily a revolution in cotton textile production, one that depended for profitability on the enslavement of humans in the American South and the exploitation of Britain's colonies. Without slavery in America, the Industrial Revolution would have looked very different.