Periodic Reporting for period 3 - PoliticsOfPatents (Politics of Patents: Re-imagining citizenship via clothing inventions 1820 - 2020)
Reporting period: 2022-03-01 to 2023-08-31
Politics of Patents (POP) explores connections between citizenship and clothing. This five-year project undertakes a sociological investigation of 200 years of clothing inventions in global patent archives. We explore how inventors have created new forms of clothing over the last two centuries that resist, subvert, or disrupt social and political norms and beliefs, and in the process, bring new expressions of citizenship into being. Inventors are the focus as they operate on the cutting edge of social and political change; building on the past to make claims on the present and imagine different futures. Considering clothing inventions as ‘acts of citizenship’, means the project examines new ideas about how citizenship are ‘enacted’, as in claimed, performed and contested, through practices of patenting over the last 200 years. We ask: What do clothing inventions reveal about hegemonic norms and beliefs? What kinds of citizens are made possible or re-imagined through clothing inventions? Can clothing inventions be read as acts of political resistance, contestation, or subversion? What might a study of clothing inventions reveal about citizenship in the past, today and the future? The interdisciplinary POP team approach the study of invention using inventive mixed methods. Our critical and creative practice research is located in the POPLab where we quantitively examine big datasets, undertake in-depth visual and document analysis and conduct interviews with global contemporary inventors. We are also pioneering speculative sewing. This involves researching, reconstructing, and reimagining a collection of historic garments and examining them as three-dimensional arguments.
The project started 1 March 2019. This report covers half the project – 2.5 years. So, far we have completed 3 Work Packages and are progressing well with two others. We have set up a project website and the POPLab where we research, reconstruct and reimagine patent data. We have completed the initial WP1 - Map across time involving quantitative analysis of 297,000 patent data. The aim was to uncover clusters of typologies of patents by space and time, with separate analyses conducted for patents by region of origin as well as across periodic moments in history. Insights underpin WP2 - Map across theme. In this WP, qualitative analysis of emerging categories generated in WP1 and identified 10 core themes. We have completed WP4 - Map across makers earlier than planned. 45 interviews have been undertaken with clothing inventors all around the world. We are currently in the process of WP3 - Map across bodies. This part of the project involves approaching patent data as three-dimensional arguments. We are sewing 50 garments from historic archives (approx. 10 pieces per theme). The final WP is WP5 - Map across the archive. This is the independent PhD project which is progressing on schedule.
We have generated a larger dataset of wearable apparel patent data than expected. In addition to robustly underpinning the project, the POP dataset is the source of an experimental collaboration with open access publishers, COPIM and Mattering Press. This part of the project is in development. We continue to work on schedule and more in-progress outcomes will be reported on at the next stage.