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If I Don’t Do Some Couching I Will Burst’ was the explanation I gave to Dr. Amy Twigger-Holroyd to explain my need to make in order to feel more balanced due to work commitments generally, and during the Covid-19 pandemic in particular, and why I drew on couching as a stitch to achieve this. It was not until writing this essay about ‘The Piece’ I stitched in 2021 to stop me from ‘bursting’, that I realised the centrality of the work to expanded meanings of self-care.‘The Piece’ links my claims for psychological space, physical making space, camaraderie with like-minded makers and a quest for wholeness, all taking place within my home, in order to achieve the space that Louise Bourgeois refers to as being ‘‘a metaphor for the structure of our existence’ (Lorz 2015).

Carol Tulloch is an author, curator, maker and academic, and Professor of Dress, Diaspora and Transnationalism at the University of the Arts in London. She grew up in Doncaster in the North of England and studied BA Fashion and Textile Design at Ravensbourne College Design and Communication, and MA History of Design at the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum. She is known for her innovative work on heritage, personal archives, style narratives and auto/biography, and her books include Black Style (2004) and The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (2016). She has curated and co-curated a wide range of exhibitions, including Grow Up! Advice and the Teenage Girl (The Women’s Library, 2002); The March of the Women: Suffragettes and the State (National Archives, 2003); Picture This: Representations of Black People in Product Promotion (Archives and Museum of Black Heritage, 2002); Black British Style (V&A, 2004); and Rock Against Racism (Autograph, 2015). In this interview, conducted online in summer 2021, she talks to Jo Littler about her work and the contexts and cultures it emerged out of.

This chapter draws attention to the T-shirts associated with the UK Anti-Apartheid Movement to discuss the significance of T-shirts in anti-racist and human rights activism. It is another example of Carol Tulloch's exploration of style activism.

Tulloch's article is her response to the exhibition 'Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test', in the (unpaginated) exhibition publication of the same name. the project was a portrait of the women of the dancehall in Jamaica. The publication was a unpaginated supplement to KALEIDOSCOPE Magazine, No.38 on the occasion exhibition “Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test” at Red Bull Arts Detroit, USA.

Introduction to the book subsection of the same title edited by Tulloch.

What follows is an auto/biographical telling (Stanley 1992; Anderson 2011: 40; Tulloch 2016: 7–8) of the place of my Jamaican parent’s cocktail champagne glass in their practice of settlement and becoming in England. The study takes note of the possible impact of what Dinesh Bhugra and Matthew A. Becker refer to as ‘cultural bereavement’ (Bhugra and Becker 2005) experienced by Caribbean migrants in their new home of England, and what role the seemingly innocuous champagne glass may have on their sense of well-being post-migration. The inheritance of this glass by my siblings and me is an example of what I call generational continuity. The chapter explains how the taste of an earlier generation, my parents, is passed on as evidence and meaning of a particular tactic of their being and as an investment in their future self through their children who keep their things.

Review article of the exhibition Units of Possibility: The Reknit Revolution

This is a peer reviewed chapter in the book The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology (published within Routledge’s Culture, Economy and the Social Series). The chapter, ‘The configurational encounter and the problematic of beholding’, is in Part I of the book, entitled ‘Taste and Art’ (edited by Dave Beech). Engaging the aesthetics of reception as its field of inquiry, the chapter draws upon the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘blank’ as a staged suspension of connectivity, arguing for a reassignment of the aesthetic in terms of a ‘configurational encounter’ that problematizes the work/beholder relation. This constitutes a rare attempt to apply reception aesthetics to contemporary art, a ‘gap’ first highlighted by the art historian Michael Ann Holly in her 2002 article ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, published in A Companion to Art Theory. Utilising concrete examples of practice, the chapter asks whether the shift towards inter- or transmedia art practices, characterising postconceptual art, renders Bourdieu’s characterisation of the ‘autonomous’ artwork superfluous to the contemporary situation, and whether the kinds of judgments of taste associated with the acquisition of cultural capital are no longer relevant. The chapter argues that in revealing material processes, rules, instructions or appropriations – and/or its situated reception and apparatus of display – the configurational encounter problematizes the beholder’s bodily and ideological orientation toward an artwork, revealing our embodied dispositions or ‘habitus’. This counters philosopher Peter Osborne’s suggestion that a change in art’s ‘ontology’ post 1960s renders questions of aesthetics obsolete (a prevalent position within contemporary art theory) and reconceives the aesthetic as emerging from the oscillation of spatial and ideational perspective switches (to use Iser

The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts.

Chapter abstract: This chapter is a critical response to notions of a ‘post-taste’ museum where hierarchies of taste are said to be flattened and no longer relevant to understanding the dynamics of the global museum of today. In three principal sections, the chapter draws on the author’s years of curatorial practice both inside and outside of a major ‘global museum’ – Tate Britain – to assess the institution’s attempts to embrace the global in its curatorial and discursive programmes. The first section comments on the nature of the supposed ‘post-taste’ global moment through an analysis of an important art work by conceptual artist Richard Wentworth that anticipated many of the hollow claims about globalisation and taste that many museums have adopted since the 1990s. The second section reflects on the author’s practice at Tate Britain as head of the Cross Cultural Programme which attempted to come to grips with questions of globalisation and migration in British art. The final section is a selection of ‘mantras’ or inspirational ideas drawn from important artists and critics who have influenced the author’s approach to forging a more self-reflexive and critical approach to curatorial practice in a global museum. About the book: This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste. It brings curators together with sociologists and art theorists and artists with design historians, art historians and cultural historians, with the common aim of developing rigorous and relevant ways to approach the practice of taste. The contributors to this book engage with the practice of taste as this relates to encounters with art, engagements with cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life in national and transnational contexts. While taking account of Bourdieu’s legacy, the book addresses the larger question of why it became important to seek out the social value conferred by taste and whether this form of value

The chapter A Riot of Our Own: A Reflection on Agency published in 'Disturbing Pasts: Memories, Controversies and Creativity (2018) is the published version of an online article, of the same name, first published in the Open Arts Journal 2014. The work is a reflection on the exhibition A Riot of Our Own, an archival narrative on the Rock Against Racism Movement (RAR) of 1976-1981. This was told through the personal archives of Syd Shelton and Ruth Gregory who were RAR (London) committee members. It was first shown in 2008 at the CHELSEA Space Gallery, London, and went on tour to venues in London and Croatia. The paper traces the tenacious pursuit of anti-racist agency of RAR that has not lost its historical relevancy in the twenty-first century. What is discussed here is the black and white dynamic of difference as unity against the black and white intolerance of difference that marked Britain. Additionally the article will explain that the need to exercise agency was the connecting thread between all those involved in curating the exhibition, a thread that stretched back to RAR’s activism during the five years of its life, to a telling of those years in 2008. The article contributes to the current rise in the study of ‘design activism’.

The coda to this book, for which I was the General Editor, reflects on one of the aims for our book, which was to identify the contradictions that are inherent in the persistence of the social value created by taste. I discuss this with reference to Michael Bhaskar’s book Curation (2016). Bhaskar’s arguments for the continuity of tastemaking are made against the background of the supersession of individual choice by impersonal algorithms. I suggest that it may be more important to consider the possibility that the confrontation between the tastemaker and the algorithm, rather than making the tastemaker more important than ever, could reveal the insupportable contradictions of taste and the anachronism of its model of value.

The introduction to this book, for which I was the General Editor, begins by outlining how the book, which began with a conference at Chelsea College of Arts in May 2014, offers an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste. It addresses the historical development and contemporary relevance of the socially distributed value conferred by taste and asks how those who are involved in the arts contribute to the analysis of taste. The introduction then engages with: 1. An analysis of the sociology of taste ‘After Bouurdieu’ 2. An analysis of how Bourdieu’s account of taste as a means of producing and reproducing social hierarchy, paradoxically does not take account of the transformation of social hierarchy by taste in the bourgeois revolution. 3. The possibilities and contradictions for arts practitioners revealed by Bourdieu’s ‘socioanalysis’ of taste. 4. A summary of the chapters. 5. A conclusion in which I outline the possibility that we may now be experiencing bourgeois taste in reverse, a situation in which the general management of pathology is the cultural norm and self-management through taste is the cultural exception.

Exhibition Publication

Tim Lewis, Review of 'The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora' in The Observer explains: 'The Birth of Cool is the product of a lifetime’s research – initially unwitting but latterly professional – into black style and culture. In the book, Tulloch selects a handful of images taken during the 20th century and offers an in-depth analysis of the significance of the clothes and also what the photographs tell us about wider society at the time they were taken. Some of the subjects are well known: jazz singer and “black female dandy” Billie Holiday, for example, or the civil rights activist Malcolm X. Other images have a personal resonance for Tulloch. The book cover features her “Aunt G”, Gloria Bennett, photographed in Doncaster in 1961 wearing a ruffled dress that she made herself and posing in front of a Jaguar Mk2 that did not belong to her or her husband, neither of whom could drive. The cigarette she confidently cradles “is a declaration of freedom”, writes Tulloch, “black feminine freedom.” Text on the back cover of the book: It is broadly recognized that black style had a clear and profound influence on the history of dress in the twentieth century, with black culture and fashion having long been defined as ‘cool’. Yet despite this high profile, in-depth explorations of the culture and history of style and dress in the African diaspora are a relatively recent area of enquiry. The Birth of Cool asserts that ‘cool’ is seen as an arbiter of presence, and relates how both iconic and ‘ordinary’ black individuals and groups have marked out their lives through the styling of their bodies. Focusing on counter- and sub-cultural contexts, this book investigates the role of dress in the creation and assertion of black identity. From the gardenia corsage worn by Billie Holiday to the work-wear of female African-Jamaican market traders, through to the home-dressmaking of black Britons in the 1960s, and the meaning of a polo-neck jumper as depicted in a 19

Activism, African diaspora as a methodology, auto/biography, [the] black body, black style, collage, cool, concepts, connection, conversations, curating, curator, detail, difference, disconnection, experimentation, flows, glamour, graphic argument, historical ‘truth’, making, networks, objects, people, personal archives, quiet, reflection, portraits, style-fashion-dress, style narratives, taste, tensions, terminology, to be. Carol Tulloch will reflect on her research practice that, with hindsight, have become the signposts for her most recent publication The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora, a work that connects a range of personal experiences through style.

Carol Tulloch curated this exhibition, which formed part of the inaugural International Fashion Showcase organized by the British Council and British Fashion Council. A curatorial framework of the project was to stress the individualism of African countries, a reality often forgotten, whilst simultaneously connected as part of a continent.

The aim of this workshop was, 'to explore the processes through which craft connects individuals and groups, in person and virtually, through communities of knowledge, skill and interest, shared memories and values, a mutual commitment to activism or sustainable living, a need to establish alternative ways of working,or simply the desire to decorate oneʼs home or improve quality of life'. Carol Tulloch was invited to be part of the 30 delegates of this closed workshop, to contribute to group discussions.

A profile of the the style group 'Buffalo' led by Ray Petri. A contribution to the V&A exhibition catalogue 'Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990'.

Salon discussion amongst four panelists and the audience on issues of textiles, dress, narrative, personal heritage, belonging. The Salon series was inspired by and supported the exhibition 'Aware: Art, Fashion, Identit'.

Handmade Tales: Women and Domestic Crafts considered how domestic crafts can be a space to channel different life experiences. It focussed on the practices of the ‘amateur’ rather than the ‘professional designer-maker/artist’, for whom the making of things in their ‘quieter moments’ for others or themselves is part of the autobiography of both the maker and the receiver. In order to demonstrate the cultural influences that have contributed to the vast practice that is domestic crafts in Britain, the show included a range of cultures and age groups from different strata of society from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

A review of the what informed the decision to curate the exhibition Handmade Tales: Women and Domestic Crafts, and the twists, turns and outcomes of the project.

The paper argued that in thinking about dress associated with the African diaspora at present, it is still necessary to think of Africa as part of its diaspora, and that the term African diaspora is still relevant as a framing mechanism for a subject that is still in the process of development.

A summary of the main ideas and outcomes of the Dress and the African Diaspora Network.

Using a Bruce Oldfield gown and two African-American T-shirts to discuss difference and creativity.

This oral history based article, first published in 1999, looks at the home dressmaking practice of Mrs Anella James as a child in Jamaica to woman- and motherhood in London. The account illustrates how dressmaking is part of the transitions in ones life.

This chapter details key moments and issues of the Rock Against Racism (RAR) Movement 1976-1981, and its legacy such as the exhibition A Riot of Our Own. Significantly, it considers what kind of blackness and whiteness was present during the life of RAR.

Radio 4 programme interviewee.

This article examines terms that are central to critical thinking on dress associated with the African diaspora. Through a series of case studies on an accessory and garments produced and/or used in England, the United States and South Africa, notably London, New York and Soweto, the terms style, fashion, dress, black and post-black are considered with regard to specific use, contemporary relevance, or past-present connections. Such multi-faceted connections projected from the clothed black body is to be expected in such diasporic practices. A key aim of this essay is to expand on this and to think about these terms in relation to garments and black bodies of the African diaspora as networks of ideas and concerns.

This Special issue of the Journal 'Fashion Theory' was the culmination of the critical thinking undertaken in the Dress and the African Diaspora Network, an AHRC funded project. The contributors were all core members of the network, whose articles reflect the debates that informed the network.

Introduction to the special issue 'Dress and the African Diaspora'

A response to the Autograph exhibition 'Ever Young: James Barnor', with a focus on the styles worn by men, women and children in Ghana and London.

A Riot of Our Own was an archival narrative on the Rock Against Racism movement (RAR , 1976-1981, through the personal archive of Ruth Gregory and Syd Shelton. Both were RAR (London) committee members. The design, ephemera and photographic material kept by Ruth and Syd provides another aspect of that historical moment. A Riot of Our Own revisits the energy of RAR: from the design studio, to carnivals, to gigs, on tour, to demonstrations and back to the design studio.

Terminologies that have come to be key terms that have informed the critical thinking on dress and the African diaspora were considered in terms of their relevance in the 21st century, with additional archival material on a Bruce Oldfield gown.

The conversation was between the artist Susan Stockwell and the fashion designer/consultant Avis Charles. With an introduction by me, the panellists discussed the relevance of style/fashion/dress to an understanding of art and culture.