Jessica Hemmings is Professor of Craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is Visiting Professor with the Doctoral School of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Hungary (2022), the Rita Bolland Fellow at the Research Centre for Material Culture, the Netherlands (2020-2023 and a member of the editorial boards of Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture and Craft Research. Jessica is the author of Yvonne Vera: the Voice of Cloth (2008), Warp & Weft (Bloomsbury, 2012), and the editor of In the Loop: Knitting Now (2012) and Cultural Threads (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Each section includes an extended introduction and annotated guide to further reading to support study beyond the text

Introduction

1. Touch

1. Victoria Mitchell (1997) 'Textiles, Text and Techne'
2. T'ai Smith (2014) 'The Haptics of Optics: Weaving and Photography' (excerpt)
3. Elaine Igoe (2010) 'The Tacit-Turn: Textile design in design research'
4. Pennina Barnett (1999) 'Folds, Fragments, Surfaces: Towards a poetics of cloth'
5. Catherine Harper (2005) "Meditation on Translation and Seduction"
6. Isak Dinesen (1957) 'The Blank Page'
7. Birgitta Nordström (2020) 'How do you Footnote a Smile? One Dialog about Two Extremes of Textile Research'

2. Memory
8. Jenni Sorkin (2000) 'Stain: On Cloth, Stigma, and Shame'
9. Isabel Cristina González Arango (2013/2021) 'Claiming the Right to Memory, Stitch by Stitch: The experience of the Costurero Tejedoras por la Memoria de Sonsón' (the Sonsón Memory Sewing Group)
10. Marit Paasche (2019) 'We Are Living on a Star' (excerpt)
11. Roger Hutchinson (2011) The Silent Weaver (excerpt)
12. Faith Ringgold (2019) 'Interview: Faith Ringgold and Hans Ulrich Obrist' (excerpt)
13. Sue Prichard (2005) 'Collecting the Contemporary: Love Will Decide What Is Kept and Science Will Decide How It Is Kept'
14. Sarah Scaturro (2020) '(Im)mortal Fashion: Iris van Herpen's "Skeleton" Dress'
15. Takahashi Mizuki (2019) 'Hong Kong's Textile Industrial Heritage: Transformations to a place of weaving creative experiences for all'

3. Structure
16. Gottfried Semper (1851/1989) 'The Four Elements of Architecture' (excerpt)
17. Philip Beesley (1999) 'Reflexive Textile'
18. Otti Berger and Judith Raum (1930/2019) 'Fabrics in Space' & 'Weaving and Interior Design': Voice-over for the video Discussion of Material (excerpt)
19. Catherine de Zegher (1997) 'Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as Knots'
20. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (1987) '1440 The Smooth & the Striated' (excerpt)
21. Sabrina Gschwandtner (2008) 'Knitting Is.'
22. Kate Goldsworthy, Rebecca Earley and Kay Politowicz (2019) 'Circular Speeds: A Review of Fast & Slow Sustainable Design Approaches for Fashion & Textile Applications'

4. Politics
23. James Fenimore Cooper (1843) Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief (excerpt)
24. Arthur C. Danto (2006) 'Weaving as Metaphor and Model for Political Thought'
25. Sarat Maharaj (1991) 'Arachne's Genre: Towards Intercultural Studies in Textiles'
26. Susan S. Bean (1989) 'Gandhi and Khadi, the Fabric of Indian Independence'
27. Pamela Johnson (2011) '100% Cotton'
28. Galina Kareva (2011/2021) 'Ivanovo's Agitprop Textiles: Design and Inscriptions'
29. Elisa Auther (2008) 'Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960-80'
30. Julia Bryan-Wilson (2017) 'Queer Handmaking' (excerpt)
31. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) 'The Yellow Wallpaper' (excerpt)

5. Production
32. Roger MacDougall (1951) The Man in the White Suit (excerpt)
33. Maria Fusco (2018) 'machine oil smells sweet (piecework)'
34. Melanie Miller (2007) 'The Romance of Modern Manufacture: A Brief History of Embroidered Embellishment'
35. Sadie Plant (1997) Zeroes + Ones: Digital women + the new technoculture (excerpt)
36. Ele Carpenter (2010) 'Open Source Embroidery: Curatorial Facilitation Of Material Networks'
37. Boatema Boateng (2011) 'Why Should the Copyright Thing Work Here?' (excerpt)
38. Sarah Rhodes (2015) 'Contemporary textile imagery in Southern Africa: a question of ownership'
39. Yosi Anaya (2016/2021) 'Heneque¿n, A Green Fiber with a Complex History in Yucatan'

6. Community
40. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850) The Scarlet Letter (excerpt)
41. Joseph McBrinn (2021) 'Needlework and the creation of masculinities: "The prick" of patriarchy' (excerpt)
42. Jools Gilson (2012) 'Navigation, Nuance and half/angel's Knitting Map: A series of navigational directions.'
43. Rose Sinclair (2020) 'Tracing Back to Trace Forwards: What does it mean/take to be a Black textile designer'
44. Alice Walker (1973) 'Everyday Use'
45. Ursula K. Le Guin (1984) 'The Trouble with the Cotton People' (excerpt)