‘Contested urban fabrics: making markets with second-hand garments in Tunis’ by Katharina Grüneisl (University of Nottingham)
This talk is concerned with the making of markets at the back end of the global clothing value chain. It chooses the vantage point of Tunisia, North Africa’s largest current importer and re-exporter of European and North American used garments, to ask how such transnational surplus circulations become contested fabrics of market-making. Cast-out in their origin countries as excess matter, imported used garments must be actively re-incorporated into the market through contingent processes of valuation. Life histories of used clothes traders and encounters with diverse actors who participate in valuation work with imported used clothing in Tunisia’s capital city Tunis elucidate how the urban market becomes delimited as an evolving sphere of circulation, valuation, and exchange. As this talk demonstrates, the making and re-making of such market boundaries has transformed the urban fabric of Tunis past and present. Market-making is thus analysed as a situated process of urban order-making and spatial co-production, providing new perspectives on the contested processes through which markets remake contemporary cities.
About the Speaker:
Katharina Grüneisl is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham and an affiliated researcher at the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC). She is interested in cities, ethnography, economies, and work; as part of her research, shestudies the used clothing trade and garment industry in Tunisia and Jordan.
