Museum of Fashion and Liberation & Transnational Feminisms (WGS 411)

2025, UMASS BOSTON

Co-taught and developed a course with Candace Famiglietti introducing students to transnational feminist theory through the application of these concepts to a case study of the global textile and fashion industry. Drawing on transnational feminist theory, we examined how capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and global labor systems shape women’s lives and labor across borders, while also asking whose work, whose knowledge, and whose stories are valued or made invisible. Through feminist praxis and embodied learning, students researched and reclaimed overlooked labor histories and challenged the local/global binary by tracing connections between garment workers, caregivers, families, communities, and the clothes we consume in everyday life.

The course culminated in a student-created, public-facing event, the Museum of Fashion and Liberation: a living feminist archive that brought together research, oral histories, portraiture made with photographer Mei Tao, zines, and a quilting bee to revalue women’s care and creative labor and reimagine fashion as a collective space of culture, memory, resistance, and alternative futures. Students interviewed garment workers, artists, designers, organizers, entreprenuers, and farmers from the United States, Bangladesh, Ecuador, Peru, China, Ghana, and Tanzania repairing and reimagining fashion systems from the ground up. The course and exhibition received the College of Liberal Arts Pedagogical Innovation Award (PIA) for innovative, student-centered teaching.