[Commlist] Call for Papers: 'Clothing and Dress in Times of Mass Violence'

Call for Papers: International Journal of Fashion Studies


Special Issue: 'Clothing and Dress in Times of Mass Violence'


View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/international-journal-of-fashion-studies#call-for-papers 
<https://www.intellectbooks.com/international-journal-of-fashion-studies#call-for-papers>


Clothing is ubiquitous in practices, experiences and images of genocide, 
occupation and displacement. Garments appear on bodies, against bodies 
and – devastatingly – in the absence of bodies; they are also used as 
instruments of humiliation enacted by military state apparatuses as well 
as tools of insurgent protest and resistance (see Archer 2014; Tynan 
2020; Filippello forthcoming 2026). Clothes are materially and 
conceptually bound to these conditions, as they are carriers and 
signifiers of intimacy, labour, ideologies, care and memory. Moreover, 
clothes circulate through journalism, humanitarian discourse, legal 
frameworks, digital media and global spectatorship. To attend to 
clothing in contexts of mass violence is to attend to the conditions 
under which lives are made in/visible and un/grievable.

Fashion, dress and clothing provide a critical lens for interpreting the 
material, social and affective dimensions of colonial state violence, 
revealing how vulnerability and power are inscribed onto, and contested 
by, un/clothed bodies. Yet, within fashion studies, such violence has 
rarely been treated as an object of analysis, and fashion scholars have 
remained largely silent in the face of catastrophic geopolitical events. 
This Special Issue of International Journal of Fashion Studiesseeks to 
develop methods capable of positioning fashion studies in relation to 
urgent political and humanitarian concerns. Recent work has indeed begun 
to address this gap by attending to garments as trace, relation and 
evidence within the image field of unfolding ethnic cleansing in 
Palestine (Fahd and Robinson 2026; Muhawar 2026). Building on this 
scholarship, the Special Issue asks what it means to think about fashion 
under conditions of state violence, and what it means to do so at this 
current juncture. We take the ongoing destruction of life in Gaza as a 
central provocation, while also acknowledging other contemporary sites 
of mass violence, including Sudan, Congo, Lebanon and Iran, among other 
contexts. Indeed, we welcome contributions on/from other locales 
extending beyond Palestine.

While this Special Issue will necessarily engage the connections between 
bodies and clothing under political, social and physical duress, we 
encourage authors to consider both reparative and diagnostic approaches. 
Reparative methods might attend to forms of memory, care, resistance and 
sociality through clothing and material culture, while diagnostic 
approaches may analyse how garments register and make legible the 
dynamics and ideologies of state violence. The Special Issue will 
foreground interdisciplinary approaches, drawing from visual culture, 
media studies, anthropology, sociology, art history, photography theory, 
gender and sexuality studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, 
alongside fashion studies.

The issue will include five to seven articles in the 6000–8000-word 
range that combine theoretical and empirical work, as well as shorter 
(non-peer-reviewed) submissions, visual essays, creative and/or 
reflective works and reviews (which will be featured in the journal’s 
‘Open Space & Reviews’ section). Submissions may address, but are not 
limited to:

  *

    dress under siege, displacement and occupation

  *

    clothing and the killed body

  *

    dress in images of mass violence

  *

    uses of clothes in solidarity movements

  *

    repression, looting, or confiscation of clothes by military
    enforcement entities

  *

    archives of clothing, disappearance and loss

  *

    garments as trace or evidence or memorial form

  *

    clothing and grief, mourning and care

  *

    humanitarian visuality and the politics of dress

  *

    the ethics of looking at clothing in images of violence

  *

    children’s clothing and domestic life in conditions of destruction

  *

    interdisciplinary approaches to, and methodological interventions
    for, the study of dress and violence

If you are interested in writing a piece in a language other than 
English, you can find information regarding translation on the journal’s 
website: 
https://www.intellectbooks.com/international-journal-of-fashion-studies 
<https://www.intellectbooks.com/international-journal-of-fashion-studies>

Timeline:
Deadline for abstracts:21 August 2026
Notification of selected contributors: 4 September 2026
Submission of full manuscripts: 1 February 2027

Submissions should be sent to the three guest editors of the Special 
Issue: Cherine Fahd ((Cherine.Fahd /at/ uts.edu.au) 
<mailto:(Cherine.Fahd /at/ uts.edu.au)>), Roberto Filippello 
((r.filippello /at/ uva.nl) <mailto:(r.filippello /at/ uva.nl)>) and Todd Robinson 
((Todd.Robinson /at/ uts.edu.au) <mailto:(Todd.Robinson /at/ uts.edu.au)>)

Editorial Team:

Dr Cherine Fahd
Associate Professor of Visual Communication, University of Technology Sydney

Cherine Fahd is an artist and writer working across photography, video 
and participatory practice. Her work examines portraiture, ethics and 
the political and social life of images, with a focus on how visibility 
and recognition are structured.

Dr Roberto Filippello
Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam

Roberto Filippello is a scholar of visual and material culture who works 
on the relationship between dress and politics, specifically in SWANA. 
His work examines how fashion and textile-based practices can serve as 
forms of critique that destabilize colonial, capitalist and 
heteropatriarchal systems.

Dr Todd Robinson
Senior Lecturer in the School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

Todd Robinson is an interdisciplinary researcher, designer, curator and 
artist specializing in the relationship between fashion and embodiment. 
His research is oriented towards developing embodied perspectives in 
fashion studies and the associated implications for fashion practice, 
theory, technology and ethics.

References

Archer, Nicole (2014), ‘Security blankets: Uniforms, hoods, and the 
textures of terror’, Women & Performance, 24:2&3, pp. 186–202.

Fahd, Cherine and Robinson, Todd (2026), ‘Clothing without bodies’, 
Fashion Highlight, 5, pp. 16–25;

Filippello, Roberto (forthcoming 2026), ‘Fashion storytelling and the 
aesthetics of queer stealth in Jenin’, Journal of Middle East Women’s 
Studies, 22:2.

Muhahwar, Laila (2026), ‘An egregious case of cultural appropriation: 
The dress in the portrait’, Third Text(Forum: ‘Thinking Gaza: Critical 
Interventions’), 11 March, pp. 1–8, www.thirdtext.org/mushahwar-thedress 
<http://www.thirdtext.org/mushahwar-thedress>. Accessed 10 April 2026.

Tynan, Jane (2020), ‘Images of insurgency: Reading the Cuban Revolution 
through military aesthetics and embodiment,’, in C. Baker (ed.), Making 
War on Bodies: Militarisation, Aesthetics and Embodiment in 
International Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 213–41.


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