Textile Economies

7 - Life cycle assessment and product carbon footprint modelling of textile products

Communities of weavers: A methodology for analyzing textile and cloth production

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the current status of the records management science education in Japan, and to examine the implications of the rapid growth of this filed while noting some of its significant issues and problems. The goal of records management science education is to improve the quality of information services and to assure an adequate supply of information professionals. Because records management science programs prepare students for a professional career, their curricula must encompass elements of both education and practical training. This is often expressed as a contrast between theory and practice. The confluence of the social, economic and technological realities of the environment where the learning takes place affects both. This paper reviews the historical background and current trends of records management science education in Japan. It also analyzes the various types of curriculum and the teaching staff of these institutions, with focus on the status of the undergraduate program at Surugadai University, the first comprehensive, university level program in Japan. The Faculty of Cultural Information Resources, Surugadai University, a new school toward an integrated information disciplines, was opened in 1994, to explore the theory and practice of the management diverse cultural information resources. Its purpose was to stimulate and promote research in additional fields of information science by offering professional training in archival science, records management, and museum curatorship, as well as librarianship. In 1999, the school introduced a master program, the first in Japan. The Faculty has two departments and each of them has two courses; Department of Sensory Information Resources Management; -Sound and Audiovisual Information Management, -Landscape and Tourism Information Management, Department of Knowledge Information Resources Management; -Library and Information Management, -Records and Archives Management The structure of the entire curriculum is also organized in stages from the time of entrance through basic instruction and onwards. Orientation subjects which a student takes immediately upon entering university is an introduction to specialized education, in which he learns the basic methods of university education and study, During his first and second years, he arranges Basic and Core courses as essential steps towards specialization at university. For this purpose, the courses offer a wide variety of study topics. The number of courses offered, including these, amounts to approximately 150. While from his third year onwards, he begins specific courses that apply to his major field, and in a gradual accumulation of seminar classes and practical training, puts his knowledge grained to practical use. Courses pertaining to these departments are offered to students beginning their second year. However, there is no impenetrable wall between the two departments, and there are only minor differences with regard requirements for graduation. Students may select third or fourth year seminars regardless of the department to which they belong. To be awarded a B.A. in Cultural Information Resources, the student is required to earn 34 credits in Basic Courses(such as, Social History of Cultural Information, Cultural Anthropology, History of Science, Behavioral Sciences, Communication, etc.), 16 credits in Foreign Languages(including 10 in English), 14 credits on Information Processing(including both theory and practice), and 60 credits in the courses for his or her major. Finally, several of the issues and problems currently facing records management science education in Japan are briefly summarized below; -Integration and Incorporation of related areas and similar programs, -Curriculum Improvement, -Insufficient of Textbooks, -Lack of qualified Teachers, -Problems of the employment of Graduates. As we moved toward more sophisticated, integrated, multimedia information services, information professionals will need to work more closely with colleagues in other specialties. It will become essential to the survival of the information professions for librarians to work with archivists, record managers and museum curators. Managing the changes in our increasingly information-intensive society demands strong coalitions among everyone in cultural Institutions. To provide our future colleagues with these competencies will require building and strengthening partnerships within and across the information professions and across national borders.

Introduction This article seeks to isolate one major strand of work in American cultural anthropology together with its implications for the study of higher education. While the number of anthropologists who do research on higher education is fairly small, the importance of the field's theoretical and methodological contributions is significant. (1) Even though the number of people working in higher education is small, this article will not attempt to provide a comprehensive look at the field. Rather, I will begin with one set of important theoretical and methodological considerations in anthropology. I will then move to discussing some of the ways cultural anthropology makes contributions to the study of higher education. My own background as an anthropologist is very much tied up with the developments in anthropology that I will discuss. I've been heavily influenced by strands of critical theory, Marxist theory, cultural studies, semiotics, post structuralism, and postmodernism. These theoretical strands have been woven together by many cultural anthropologists in order to understand what Richard Johnson (1987) has called the Circuit of Cultural Production. What Johnson suggested is that as the cultural has been increasingly commodified, different theoretical models have been used to understand different portions of that process. He suggested that rather than seeing these theoretical trends as antagonistic, it is perhaps more useful to see them as incomplete. Johnson suggests that different theories explain different parts of the and that together they form a more complete understanding of the entire process of cultural production. It is in the spirit of Johnson's idea that I developed my own work. It is also in that spirit that we will briefly overview the development of theory in anthropology over the last twenty years. (2) The following section is one way to look at how anthropology has developed since about the early 1980s. It does not seek to be a complete intellectual history, but represents my own of how we can pull together theoretical developments in order to understand the of cultural production and how that circuit has become a transnational process. From Local Culture to Global System In the mid-1980s, George Marcus (1986, pp. 165-193) began to formulate one of cultural anthropology's key methodological problems as it moved from the study of isolated societies to looking at cultures, wherever they are found, to the study of societies deeply entwined with larger structural and cultural forces. He continued to contribute to this work over the next two decades (Marcus, 1998). A key issue that has always plagued cultural anthropology is that the main methodology of anthropologists, participant observation and ethnographic research, is very local. While it gives one a great deal of information about a specific location, it is questionable how broadly generalizable that information is. Since the beginning of modern ethnography, anthropologists have made the claim that the phenomenological conceit of being there and living amongst the natives gives one an understanding of the way of life and the native's view that can only be gotten in this way. (3) In the current world economy, Marcus argues that ethnography could engage in two main strategies that would allow it to locate its specific intimate knowledge of local interactions and individual consciousness in a broader set of structural forces, thus making ethnographic insights more useful in the contemporary world context. The first strategy he suggests is a kind of small world experiment for local communities. He suggests taking a number of local sites that have been studied ethnographically and exploring the political, economic, social, and cultural connections between them. Here the goal would be to have a theory of the global system and then to look at how these different locals are influenced by similar sets of pressures (Marcus, 1986, p. …

Global environmental politics is a relatively new field of study within international relations that focuses on issues related to the interaction of humans and the natural world. As early as the mid-19th century, scholars wrote about the role of natural resources in global security and political economy. However, much of the literature prior to the 1980s related specifically to resource extraction and development issues. It was only in the 1980s and into the 1990s that global environmental politics began to establish itself as a distinct field with its own dedicated journals and publishers, and the focus of study expanded to include global environmental problems such as ozone depletion, climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and desertification. It has emerged as a center of interdisciplinary work that integrates research from a range of fields, including geography, economics, history, law, biology, and numerous others. The interdisciplinary approach makes it difficult to define the boundaries in this rather immense field of study. The focus in this article will be on global environmental politics research that falls primarily within the larger field of international relations. Global environmental problems present many unique challenges and have thus spawned a range of subfields of study. Global environmental problems frequently involve substantial scientific complexity and ambiguity. This fact has produced a wide-ranging scholarship on the relationships between science and policy. The very long timeframes of both the consequences of environmental problems as well as the efforts to address them create a number of governance challenges given the much shorter political timeframes of politicians and diplomats. In addition, because environmental problems typically do not respect borders, they pose challenges for international cooperation, which has thus produced a growing literature on global environmental governance. The widespread potential for massive economic, political, and ecological dislocation from the consequences of global environmental problems as well as from the potential policies to address those problems have led scholars to study global environmental politics from every paradigm within international relations as well as drawing on research in numerous other disciplines. Finally, efforts to address the consequences of environmental problems have raised controversial ethical and distributive-justice questions that have produced an important philosophical literature within global environmental politics. Global environmental politics has thus emerged as a rich and diverse area of scholarship.

Raman spectrometry as a screening tool for solvent-extracted azo dyes from polyester-based textile fibres

Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth. Edited by Lynne Zacek Bassett. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2009. 336 pages $60.00 (hardcover). LynneBassett, with ten other contributors, offers a fascinating study of Massachusetts quilts in the context of history, genealogy, local industry, and textile production in the handsomely presented Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth. Including only a small percentage of the nearly 6,000 Massachusetts quilts they (and the many members of the Massachusetts Quilt Documentation Project) have studied since 1994, a wide range of techniques, fabrics and designs are represented in a thorough and carefully documented historical context. The research findings are divided into three major thematic sections: History, Community, and Memory. Approached much like an exhibition catalogue, introductory essays provide an overview of each of the three divisions and are followed by illustrated examples discussed in detail. Geographical distinctions create the divisions under History and include some of the first extant quilted objects known in Massachusetts: pieced cloth-covered hand screens and petticoats, as well as whole cloth quilts and a quilted palampore dating 1825 to 1850. Quilting gatherings, agricultural fairs, and immigrant and ethnic communities are a few of the themes that organize the section under Community; and Friendship and Signature Quilts provide two of the themes designated Memory. Bassett and her major contributors (each a textile curator, quilt historian, or independent historian) emphasize the historical context for each quilted object (documenting genealogy, researching family stories, referencing dying and textile history, citing relevant economic and industrial circumstances) with their visual description of the textiles, the patchwork or applique pattern and the quilting design of the works. The attentive descriptions of the quilts encourage careful looking on the part of the reader and the contextual history keep these works firmly planted in the history of Massachusetts. The volume's coffee table book format provides room for photographs of the entire quilted object that beautifully illustrate the textural surface of many of the works. Portrait photographs, contemporary images of relevant historic sites, details of some quilts, and line drawings articulating the quilted designs also provide welcome information. However, any non-scholarly connotations associated with the term 'coffee table book' do not apply to Massachusetts Quilts. Family oral histories are challenged and documented as factual or dispelled, references to current quilt history research appears throughout, provenance is carefully documented, collateral objects (e.g. merchants' sample swatch books and family memorabilia) shed greater light on the context of the quilt's creation, and diary entries documenting contemporary quilting activities reveal how quilts and quilting fit into the daily life of eighteenth and nineteenth century women. …

The Handloom Industry plays a vital role in the socio – economic structure of Assam in terms of providing employment and production of clothes. At the same time preserve and propagate the rich cultural heritage of Assam. Weaving in Assam is as old as human civilization itself and the art of weaving are being passed from one generation to the next. The existence of high-quality weaving skill and production of fine textiles is well documented in great epics like Mahabharata and ancient treatise like Arthashastra1of Kautilya (Choudhry, 1987). Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsang also gives rich description of existence of high-quality weaving products and their general liking of the Royal family and the nobility. Writing is the early 19th century, before the British annexed Assam, Francis Hamilton2 has given an accurate account of the state of weaving in Assam (Sarma, 2012). This Industry was directly patronized by the state, so much so that queens established weaving schools in the palace, to teach the art of weaving to the daughters of the noble widows and other female members of the household of executed prisoners were also employed by the art for spinning and weaving as a means of subsistence. The neo – vaishnavite movement of the Shri Sankardev was an equally potent force in the development in the art of weaving, especially of figured cloth. After annexation of Assam by the British3, the Handloom industry declined rapidly particularly in cities. Another British policy of de – industrialization of Assam, instead of export of cotton clothes and silk products, Assam became export of raw cotton and cocoon to fuel the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Despite, dwindling of textile weaving like all other arts with the fall of the Ahom rule, it never became extinct as many other branches of Assamese art. It is still a living art as much in demand as it had been in the medieval period (Goswami, 2012)

Like every other social practice, journalism cannot now fully be understood apart from globalization. As part of a larger platform of communication media, journalism contributes to this experience of the world‐as‐a‐single‐place and thus represents a key component in these social transformations, both as cause and outcome. These issues at the intersection of journalism and globalization define an important and growing field of research, particularly concerning the public sphere and spaces for political discourse. In this essay, I review this intersection of journalism and globalization by considering the communication field’s approach to ‘media globalization’ within a broader interdisciplinary perspective that mixes the sociology of globalization with aspects of geography and social anthropology. By placing the emphasis on social practices, elites, and specific geographical spaces, I introduce a less media‐centric approach to media globalization and how journalism fits into the process. Beyond ‘global village journalism,’ this perspective captures the changes globalization has brought to journalism.

What explains the choice of corporate political strategy in environmental politics? Drawing on recent models of actor strategy formation in political economy, this article argues that basic material interests of firms are translated into strategies in the context of institutional environments. I advance a typological model that posits how distributional effects—positive versus negative—and perceived regulatory pressure—low versus high—interact in leading firms to adopt one of four ideal-type strategies: opposition, hedging, support, and non-participation. This article examines the model through the case of corporate strategies in the making of the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme. The article contributes to theory-building on business strategy in environmental politics by offering a probabilistic explanatory model, and it flags hedging strategies as an increasingly prevalent form of business behavior.

In Central Asia, the post‐Soviet transformation period has been accompanied by significant economic and social costs, including the widening of the gender gaps in politics, economy and the social sphere. Tajikistan, which receives the largest amount of international aid and has the worst record of gender inequity in Central Asia, has quickly responded to the worsening situation by introducing quotas favoring female representation in politics, labor market and education. This article examines the context within which international gender equity norms were introduced in the 1990s as well as the factors that account for the variation in implementation of these policies. By using the case study of Tajikistan, this article suggests that the introduction of policies favoring female participation in political, economic and social life has largely depended on the transfer of international discourses on gender equality, while their implementation has been halted by historical legacies, economic realities and local political factors.

What can dance contribute to contemporary political economy and to its critique? What can current conversations in the field of political economy contribute to conversations on dance and its role within the political economy? What new insights can the connections between the two fields offer that can help imagine a world beyond the present? Setting out to engage with all of these questions, this book offers an original investigation into the relation between dance and political economy, looking in particular at the points where politics, economics and culture intersect. Arising from live conversations and exchanges, this book has been informed by contributions from leaders in the fields in dialogue with one another, including: Dance and Performance scholars: Melissa Blanco Borelli (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK / University of Maryland, College Park, US) Alexandrina Hemsley & Jamila Johnson-Small Tavia Nyong'o (Yale University, US) Political Theory/Economics/Social Theory Contributors: Elena Loizidou (Birkbeck, University of London, UK) Nina Power Usva Seregina (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)

Using data on the production and usage of cotton, the paper develops estimates for the production and consumption of cotton cloth in India during 1795–1940, and based on these numbers, revisits three issues central to interpretations of economic change in colonial India. These are trends in levels of living, the correlation between production of textiles and consumption of textiles, and consumption of clothing in India in relation to the rest of the world. Average consumption of cotton cloth in India rose even as production declined, while real income grew more slowly, if at all, than the consumption of clothing.

Test of different types of models for prediction of future trends in production of textile and clothes

Physiological traits and anatomic structures of the seed for two short cotton season genotypes (Gossypium hirsutum L.) under water stress