Fiber Optics: Plant Fiber Materials & Media

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from an anonymous donor honoring the directorship of former SHC Director John Bender, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities

Image courtesy of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology

Fibers are everywhere; from cordage and textiles to construction materials, across agricultural, fashion, and energy industries and beyond, they shape and support life in fundamental ways. Despite their importance and ubiquity, however, fibers themselves are often misidentified and/or overlooked as serious objects of study.

We at “Fiber Optics” are fomenting cross-disciplinary conversation between researchers and practitioners on (1) what fibers and fiber materials are, (2) how they are produced and used, and (3) why these questions matter. Through this ongoing dialogue, we aim to create a gestalt shift that brings fibers to the fore.

We hypothesize that fibers fall out of focus when they are treated as background features of the built environment, occupying an ancillary and intermediary position for more socially salient “things,” and when used in applications that are economically de- or undervalued in our current modes of production and consumption. We intuit that fibers are further confused due to their material properties—their general fungibility, the proliferation of blends and synthetics, and the specialization and standardization of farming and fibrecraft in our industrialized present. We wager that recovering past knowledges about fibers and connecting them with contemporary studies has immense consequences for how we understand the human condition and the world at large—from constructions of race, class, and gender, histories of colonialism, capitalist development, and material culture, to environmental conservation and sustainability in our rapidly warming planet.

We are deeply invested in questions of method—in particular, the relationship between texted/embodied knowledge, making/knowing, and culture/technology, as well as the historical developments that have separated not only “art” and “science” but also “theoretical” and “applied” sciences from each other today. Praxis is central to our project: in addition to hosting speaker events on campus, we have partnered with the O’Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm to offer hands-on workshops, including farming and processing flax, colored cotton, and indigo on experimental plots. Through experiential research, we are reflecting on what humanistic study of plant fibers illuminates about the social history of science and technology and, conversely, scientific and technological insights on plant fibers about the assumptions and methodologies of humanistic research. We hope that increasing our fiber literacy in the present will help invigorate interest in and attention to the past as well as inform our ethical and political imagination going forward.

We are committed to cultivating a welcoming space on campus for intellectual exchange among faculty, students, staff, and community members both inside and outside the classroom. If you would like to be in the loop about our events and activities or get involved, please reach out to us and/or subscribe to our listservs below:

For workshop activities (you will receive emails for all formal events posted to the SHC website, but not ongoing farming/fibrecraft activities on the Farm):
fiberoptics@lists.stanford.edu [subscribe here]
contact: Michelle Ha (Modern Thought and Literature), mha1@stanford.edu 

For general Farm activities (you will receive emails for all farming/fibrecraft activities on the Farm, but not formal events posted to the SHC website):
fiberopticsfarm@lists.stanford.edu [subscribe here]
contact: Michelle Ha (Modern Thought and Literature), mha1@stanford.edu

For flax activities:
fiberopticsflax@lists.stanford.edu [subscribe here]
contact: Michelle Ha (Modern Thought and Literature), mha1@stanford.edu

For colored cotton activities:
fiberopticscotton@lists.stanford.edu [subscribe here]
contact: Edi Dai (Office of the Vice President for the Arts), edidai@stanford.edu

For indigo activities:
fiberopticsindigo@lists.stanford.edu [subscribe here]
contact: Niharika Gunturu (Applied Physics), ngunturu@stanford.edu