Recipient Katharina Grüneisl
Date 01 June, 2023
Amount £8000.00
Summary This writing fellowship will be used to complete a monograph that provides the first ethnographic and historically situated account of the second-hand clothing economy in Tunisia’s capital city Tunis. The book project is based on 22 months of doctoral and postdoctoral research, completed over a period of five years between 2017 and 2022. Evolving imports of European and North American textile surplus materials and second-hand donations – which first arrived in Tunisia during the final years of the Second World War – constitute the entry point of this urban ethnography. Through close-up portraits of the diverse actors who participate in the contingent re-valuation of imported used garments at the urban micro-scale, the book demonstrates how seemingly marginal processes of market-making have been central to urban change and politics in post-independence Tunis.