Sustainable Fashion, Textiles and Craft Economies

This theme treats fashion and textiles as interconnected economic, ecological, cultural, and political systems. Moving from fiber cultivation and industrial production to artisan craft economies and global trade, participants examine how sustainability, labor dignity, infrastructure, policy, and market access shape the life cycle of a product.

India provides an unusually high-resolution field laboratory where integrated textile parks, export-driven industrial clusters, and globally recognized craft ecosystems coexist. This allows students to examine both scale-intensive manufacturing and heritage-based production within one comparative framework.

Through seminars, industrial visits, design studios, and community engagement, participants move beyond aesthetics into lifecycle analysis, circular economy strategies, and ethical sourcing frameworks—producing academically rigorous, field-grounded outputs.

Participants will:

Map textile and fashion value chains end-to-end (fiber → processing → manufacturing → logistics → retail → waste) using systems-thinking frameworks.
Identify environmental and labor “hot spots” using lifecycle assessment tools and sustainability metrics.
Conduct ethically structured stakeholder interviews (workers, managers, artisans, regulators) using informed consent and anonymity protocols.
Analyze industrial textile policy and infrastructure (integrated parks, export competitiveness, compliance systems) as ecosystem-building mechanisms.
Compare craft-based and industrial production models as distinct development pathways with differing sustainability and equity implications.
Design circularity and traceability interventions grounded in real-world field evidence.
Produce faculty-gradeable outputs including sustainability audit reports, circular product redesign memos, and responsible sourcing briefs with measurable indicators.

Textile Engineering

Apparel Technology

Sustainability Studies

Environmental Science

Circular Economy

Business

Economics

Development Studies

Anthropology

Labor Studies

Gender Studies

Supply Chain Management

Public Policy

Industrial Engineering

Marketing

Global Trade Studies

Design Innovation

Cultural Economics

INDIA

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