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.
