Dr Charlotte Linton

I am a social anthropologist and designer whose work is situated at the intersection of visual, material and economic anthropology, textiles and ethnoecology. I am interested in the relationships that craftspeople have with the environments from which they extract and use resources during commodity production. I identify historical and contemporary links that concern the exploitation of ecosystems, workers and underrepresented communities. I have carried out ethnographic work with Harris Tweed weavers in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland (2015) and received a DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford (2021) with a thesis based on twelve months of apprenticeship-based fieldwork with natural dye craftspeople on the island of Amami Oshima, southern Japan. A monograph based on my doctoral thesis will be published by Duke University Press in 2025 titled Dyeing with the Earth: Textiles, Tradition and Sustainability in Contemporary Japan. My new research explores the intersection of textiles and agriculture in diverse geographies - the UK, USA and India. Using comparative ethnography, I am seeking to understand how small-scale producers of natural fibres and dyestuffs are adapting their practices in the context of challenging environmental, social and economic conditions. I ask whether a grassroots approach to regenerative land stewardship and aspirations to work more ethically and sustainably might trickle up, impacting the wider fashion and textiles industries at scale.