Below is the brief for the 3X3 task given to students in June 2025:
Below is the reading list that accompanied the above summer research task:
Below is the film list provided to students along side the above brief:
Lastly, Below is the locations provided to students to visit:
When I look back at the reading and film lists I’ve built for students around themes of identity, culture, and selfhood, I’m struck by a tension that feels both productive and unresolved. On the one hand, these lists are intentionally loaded with work that challenges norms. They include queer cinema, postcolonial literature, feminist writing, and experimental form. On the other, they still sit uncomfortably close to ideas of canon, authorship, and validation that higher education is actively trying to unpick.
Across both lists, identity is rarely stable or neatly defined. Texts such as Orlando by Woolf, Giovanni’s Room by Baldwin, Zami by Lorde, and The Left Hand of Darkness by Le Guin sit alongside films like Orlando by Sally Potter, Querelle by Fassbinder, Pink Flamingos by John Waters, and Priscilla Queen of the Desert. These works resist identity as a label. Instead, they frame it as something fluid, performed, and often uncomfortable.
Stuart Hall’s writing on identity is useful here, particularly his assertion that identity is not something already formed, but “a production, which is never complete, always in process” (Hall, 1990), this is particualrly useful in the context of fashion where identity is created and preformed somtimes seasonally. It underpins why these lists lean so heavily into narrative instability, camp, queerness, and contradiction. This is especially relevant for fashion students, whose practice often sits at the intersection of self-construction and performance.
Both lists draw heavily from counter-cultural movements. They include queer underground cinema, modernist and postmodern literature, and experimental film. Yet many of these works, such as those by Anger, Waters, Woolf, Joyce, and Fellini, are now institutionalised as radical.
This is where the discomfort creeps in. As bell hooks reminds us, “No need to imagine that marginality is a site of pure resistance” (hooks, 1990). What began as transgressive has often been absorbed into the academy, curated into a new kind of canon that still privileges white, Western authorship.
In the film list especially, the dominance of white male auteurs is hard to ignore, even when the subject matter itself is transgressive. The risk is that students learn to associate innovation, rebellion, and authorship with a narrow demographic, even as the work critiques power.
The reading list attempts to counter this through postcolonial and global texts. These include Achebe, Salih, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, El Saadawi, Bâ, Rushdie, and Ghosh, alongside Indigenous writers such as Silko and Dimaline. These texts foreground identity as something shaped by empire, migration, language, and historical violence.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s insistence that culture is a “carrier of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world” (Ngũgĩ, 1986) feels particularly relevant for fashion students, whose work is often deeply entangled with visual culture inherited from colonial systems.
However, even here, I’m aware that many of these texts are those already sanctioned by Western publishing and academic frameworks. Decolonising the curriculum, as Tuck and Yang caution, “is not a metaphor” (2012). A reading list alone cannot dismantle structural inequality, but it can either reinforce or question it.
Problematic Texts and Ethical Responsibility
The film list contains works that are ethically complex. These include Last Tango in Paris, Saló, Kids, and Nanook of the North. These films raise important questions about consent, exploitation, authorship, and spectatorship and are inculded intentionally.
Rather than removing them, I’ve come to see the responsibility as one of framing. As Sara Ahmed argues, diversity work is often about “what becomes visible, what is allowed to stay in view” (Ahmed, 2012). These films need to be viewed and discussed as cultural artifact, this speaks to earlier ideas on this blog about the university as a brave space rather than a safe space. These references are sites where power, harm, and authorship collide.
For first-year students especially, this requires care, context, and permission to critique rather than revere/venerate.
Both lists are dense. They privilege difficulty, abstraction, and ambiguity. While it think that can be generative, it can probabaly also be exclusionary.
Inclusive pedagogy, as Gibbs and Simpson note, depends on students’ understanding “what counts as good performance” (2004). For some students, particularly those who are neurodivergent, new to academic discourse, or navigating English as an additional language, these texts can feel like locked doors rather than invitations.
This is where I increasingly see the importance of how these lists are taught. Pairing texts with visual references, fashion artefacts, music, or contemporary culture allows students to enter through affect, image, or material rather than theory alone. I’ve expanded on this in future projects outlined in future blog posts and my presentation.
Curation as Power – My Power?
Ultimately, making lists is an act of power on my part. As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, cultural value is not neutral. It is produced, reinforced, and legitimised through institutions (Bourdieu, 1984). By choosing these texts and films, I am not simply offering inspiration. I am shaping what students come to understand as important, intellectual, or worth referencing.
The challenge going forward is not to abandon these lists, but to keep them porous. This means allowing students to challenge them, supplementing them with emerging voices, and treating them as starting points rather than endpoints.
If identity is, as Hall suggests, always in process, then so too should be the curriculum that claims to teach it.
References:
Ahmed, S. (2012) On Being Included. Duke University Press
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction. Harvard University Press
Hall, S. (1990) ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference
hooks, b. (1990) Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) Decolonising the Mind. James Currey
Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. (2012) ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society
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