December
14
About Me: Self Reflexive Research
Hi everyone! My name is Phaedra McArdle and I am a third-year undergraduate at the University of Washington, majoring in linguistics and archaeology. I want to spend this section talking a little bit about who I am in relation to my research and why it matters to me. I’m a white woman from the US and Hong Kong, and I am also, queer, Autistic and disabled, and carry these perspectives and lived-experiences with me in my analysis.
I started becoming fascinated with fashion history, textile and garment archaeology/museology, and original practice reconstruction when I was about 16, facilitated at first by the wealth of material on historical costuming on Youtube. I had always been very expressive with my clothing and it was an avenue of freedom for me. I love learning about everything from the trade economies that brought fabric and raw materials to the minutiae of technique and methodology of creating garments to how those garments become cultural fundamentals and avenues for human express
ion. Experimental garment archaeology and original practice in particular are hugely interesting to me, since I love to hand sew and gain an understanding for how it must have felt to make the same dress or shirt. There is something so human about decorating ourselves in things we spend so much time and heart on, they feel like they are a part of us.
Since I have such a deep love for fashion and the craft of sewing in general, I wanted to explore what those traditions looked like outside my normal span of research, which tends to be Western Europe, and center them in a lens Indigenous knowledge systems. On a personal level, I wanted to understand the differing roles of textile and garment making traditions around the world, and how they are affected and shaped by global phenomena like colonization, the slave trade and industrialization.