TEXTILE

Heritage, Craft and Sustainability

TEXTILE: Cloth and Culture invites contributions to a special issue on Heritage, Craft and Sustainability, exploring textiles as active sites where material culture, craft practices and contemporary sustainability concerns converge.

Textiles are not merely material objects. They carry histories of labour, identity, memory, knowledge and cultural continuity. At the same time, traditional textile and craft practices are being reshaped by contemporary design, technological change, changing markets and ecological concerns.

This special issue seeks to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives that examine how textile and craft practices negotiate the relationship between heritage and transformation, tradition and innovation, and cultural continuity and sustainable futures.

The special issue emerges from the international conference Urban Cultures: Heritage, Design & Sustainable Futures (UC-HDSF 2026) and will include selected and invited contributions that demonstrate strong conceptual, empirical or methodological contributions to textile and cultural scholarship. It is envisaged as a curated scholarly collection rather than a conference proceedings volume.

Suggested Themes

• Craft ecologies, artisan labour and material knowledge systems
• Textile heritage as lived, embodied and evolving practice
• Cloth, dress, identity and cultural memory
• Traditional textiles and contemporary design practices
• Heritage crafts and sustainable textile futures
• Indigenous, vernacular and place-based textile knowledge
• Craft revival, craft clusters and artisan communities
• Intersections of craft traditions and design innovation
• Natural fibres, local materials and sustainable textile practices
• Repair, reuse, circularity and traditional textile practices
• Gender, labour and intergenerational knowledge transmission
• Cultural appropriation, authorship and intellectual property
• Cultural rights, consent and benefit-sharing in textile practices
• Digital documentation and preservation of textile heritage
• Digital technologies, archives and textile cultures
• Technology, innovation and the transformation of craft practices
• Cross-cultural and transnational textile narratives
• Museums, exhibitions, tourism and the commodification of textile heritage
• Participatory and community-centred approaches to textile research
• Climate change, material scarcity and textile communities
• Textile education, heritage and knowledge transmission
• Methodological and conceptual approaches to cloth, culture and sustainability

The list is indicative and not exhaustive. We particularly welcome research that critically examines the relationships between heritage, craft, culture, sustainability and contemporary transformation.

The special issue is associated with the international conference:

Urban Cultures: Heritage, Design & Sustainable Futures (UC-HDSF 2026)
22–23 October 2026
Manipal University Jaipur, India

The special issue will not be a proceedings publication. Only selected papers demonstrating strong alignment with the special issue theme may be invited for further development and submission, alongside other invited contributions.

The special issue aligns with TEXTILE: Cloth and Culture through its focus on the cultural, social and material dimensions of textiles. It particularly foregrounds the relationships between cloth, culture and identity; textiles and sustainability; and heritage, innovation and contemporary textile practices.