Fashion Justice: IJCJSD, Symposium and Briefing Paper

Woman wearing a caftan pointing at a color card on a table of textiles

QUT Centre for Justice and QUT School of Justice launched the Fashion Justice Special Issue in the International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. In this special issue the contributors examine multiple perspectives on the numerous injustices experienced in the ways garments are produced, consumed and disposed of within the globalised fashion system.

This launch took place as part of the QUT Centre for a Waste Free World Day on Tuesday 24 August 2022, as part of QUT Sustainability Week 2022. The Fashion Justice Symposium heard from a number of the authors from the Special Issue as they spoke about their research in the area of Fashion Justice.

Presenters included:

Contributors included:

QUT Centre for Justice Briefing Paper Series

To coincide with this launch, QUT Centre for Justice released a Briefing Paper authored by Paige Street, Sarah Bolger, Alice Payne, Martijn Boersma, Justine Coneybeer, Emmanuel Josserand, Sarah Kaine, Erin O’Brien, Rowena Maguire and Timo Rissanen on The Effects of COVID-19 on the Textile and Apparel Value Chain.

This research is part of the ‘Strategies for improving labour condition within the Australian cotton value chain’ project funded by the Cotton Research and Development Corporation (CRDC).

The Briefing Paper investigates how the Australian cotton industry can influence working conditions along the textile and apparel value chain and mitigate the risk of labour abuses occurring downstream (Boersma et al., 2022). This represents a novel approach to a well-known problem. This paper reports on some of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on garment workers worldwide to present the opportunity for ‘downstream due diligence’. The findings spotlight the need for stakeholders throughout the value chain to work collaboratively to protect worker well-being. As is argued, a wider network of actors both ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the fashion industry needs to be involved in collaborative, multi-stakeholder organising to appropriately respond to injustice in the value chain.

A pdf version of the Briefing Paper is available online.