Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
When you see behind the smoke and mirrors to find that your values do not align with an industry based on profit at all costs? How do you go from a place of not-knowing to knowing-too-much and a debilitating eco (and social) guilt that is very real?
Associate Professor Jennifer Whitty shares her journey of making the deliberate choice to opt into fashion, on her own terms. Finding her way, as Donna J. Haraway (2016) describes to stay with the trouble, has been an empowering adventure. One from a place of love, and an act of care and imagination towards fashion.
Jennifer's vision for fashion is activated through her action-led work. Starting with small interventions of hope she aspires to creates ripple effects across the entire system. Her theory of change makes a case for radically new roles, methods, mindsets and models that expand the boundaries of the field, reoriented towards being in solidarity with the real world.
The INSIDE/OUT public programme of lectures invites speakers and leading thinkers whose breadth of work, practice, thought and collaboration we feel will inspire all our students and staff across the wide range of disciplines in the Leeds School of Arts.
Lectures will be available as digital films through the LARC website and open to all.
Professor Jennifer Whitty is an Associate Professor of Design. Her work, as a designer, researcher and educator, aims to usher in a new era of deep systemic change for global fashion – one that is radical, intersectional, expansive, holistic, plural, post-colonial and relational. Rooted in social and environmental justice and flourishing for all living things, she specialises in reimagining mindsets, models, and systems through the integration of thinking and doing.
Trained at the Royal College of Art, London, Limerick School of Art and Design and the National College of Art, Dublin, she has worked in key capacities as an educator and designer in many leading design programmes and companies across the globe - USA, Europe, Asia and Australasia. Professor Jennifer Whitty publishes and exhibits widely in both academic and popular media.
