This seminar situates fashion within a temporal and spatial topography of global transformation. Engaging critically with the paradoxes of this hyper-globalized field - its aesthetic promises and its economic, social, and ecological consequences - will be a central intellectual task of the course.

The seminar introduces ethnography as a method for critical fashion research and as a way of understanding the social world through everyday practices, spatial arrangements, and embodied interactions. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Vienna, students will examine fast fashion retail spaces and analyze how local sites of consumption are intertwined with global systems of production, labor organization, supply chains, and overproduction.

By focusing on fast fashion retail environments, the course explores how pricing strategies, spatial design, marketing language, and shopping practices are connected to broader structures of industrial manufacturing, precarious labor, and accelerated consumption cycles.

As a final outcome, students will collaboratively produce a printed, xeroxed research zine that materializes their collective insights.

the course texts and in participatory formats such as an ethnographic field trip. It is my hope that you will learn as much (or more) from each other as you will from me. Class participation means more than how much you say in class; it’s your effort to be present - both in mind and in body - in our discussions.

Attendance is particularly crucial in a discussion-based course.

To receive credits for this course, you have to fulfill the following requirements:

• There is an 80% attendance requirement for courses, this means that you can miss only one of the seven course units.
• Active participation in the class discussions, in-class activities, presentations and group assignments
• Active contribution in the final (analogue) publication format
• Submission of:
  • o Ethnographic reflection (500 - 700 words)
  • o Final ethnographic essay
  • o Documented contribution to the zine
• Printed drafts brought to final production session

• Mensitieri, Giulia, 2020 [2018]: The Most Beautiful Job in the World. Transl. Natasha Lehrer. London/New York: Bloomsbury, p. xi-10 and 55-79.
• Hoskins, Tansy, 2014: Owning It. In: Stitched Up. The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. London: Pluto Press, pp. 14-32.
• Alessandra Mezzadri, 2017: The Chain and the Sweatshop. In: The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 16-41.
• Worker’s Rights Consortium, 2021: Fired, Then Robbed: Fashion brands’ complicity in wage theft during Covid 19. Research Report, April 2021.
• Fletcher, Kate and Mathilda Tham, 2019: Earth Logic Fashion Action Research Plan. London: The J J Charitable Trust.
• Loscialpo, Flavia, 2023: Ethno-Racial Capitalism within Contemporary Fashion: Forced Labour and the Uyghur Crisis. In: Almila, Anna-Mari and Serkan Delice (eds.), 2023: Fashion's Transnational Inequlities: Socio-Political, Economic, and Environmental. London/New York: Routledge p. 29-46.
• Kathleen DeWalt and Billie DeWalt, 2011: Participant Observation: A Guide for Fieldworkers. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. (selected excerpts).
• David Fetterman, 2008: Ethnography. In: The Sage Encyclopedia of Qualitative Reesearch Methods Vol. 1 & 2, edited by Lisa M. Given. Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore: Sage, p. 288-292.
• Clifford Geertz, 1973: Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture. In: The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books, p. 3-30.
• Giulia Mensitieri, 2020 [2018]: The Most Beautiful Job in the World. Transl. Natasha Lehrer. London/New York: Bloomsbury, p. xi-10 and 55-79.
• Veronica Manlow, 2016: “Experiental Luxury Shopping at the Louis Vuitton Flagship in Paris: Dramas of Identity.” Clothing Cultures, Vol. 3., issue 1, p. 23-40.
• Frederic Larsen, 2019: “Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store.” Business History, Vol. 6, Issue 1, p. 155-171.