Authors: Sarah Molina and Matthew Raj Webb
The packed virtual room at the Textile Society of America’s “Shifts and Strands” symposium on November 15, 2024, buzzed with anticipation as our panel prepared to unveil three years of collaborative thinking about textiles and language. What began as informal conversations in late 2021 had evolved into “Narrative Threads”—an ambitious vision for reimagining how we document, share, and value textile knowledge across cultures and communities.
Our project emerged from a simple yet profound observation: the language we use to describe textiles often fails to capture the richness of how makers, users, and communities actually experience and understand cloth. Traditional glossaries, with their prescriptive definitions and Eurocentric frameworks, seemed increasingly inadequate for a field as globally diverse and culturally nuanced as textile studies. We wondered: what if we could create something different—a living, breathing platform that honored multiple ways of knowing?
Art historian Sarah Molina, who initiated and stewarded this project, opened our panel by tracing the genealogy of this idea. Drawing inspiration from innovative digital humanities projects like the Dutch Textile Trade Database and the Fashion and Race Database, she articulated our vision for TSA to host an interactive, multimedia platform that would fundamentally challenge how textile knowledge is organized and shared. As anthropologist collaborator Matthew Raj Webb affirmed, rather than imposing standardized definitions, Narrative Threads would celebrate the multiplicities inherent in textile practices—the way a single technique might have dozens of names across regions, or how a term like “textile” itself carries vastly different meanings depending on who speaks it and where.
The presentations that followed, given by project members of Narrative Threads, filled in the details of the project’s radical potential. Grant writer Tonia Brown-Kinzel spoke about the importance of developing evaluation frameworks for assessing the impact of the project and contextualizing its potential within the broader landscape of funding for the arts.
Digital humanities specialist Kristin Kim drew on her expertise with digital systems, presenting compelling examples of how visual and audio elements could convey information that text alone never could: the rhythm of a loom, the texture of a thread, the gesture of a knot being tied.
Art historian Marsely Kehoe modeled how written contributions to the project could open rather than close dialogue by focusing on the keyword “cotton.” She broadened the historical narratives to examine the many meanings of cotton and its tangible impacts on humanity, ranging from inhumane exploitation to acts of self-expression.
A presentation by Matthew Raj Webb then explored how film and video could bridge the gap between academic discourse and practitioner’s experience. Drawing on footage from documentaries shot in India and Peru, he demonstrated how artisan makers rarely use the term “textile” in their own languages, preferring words like the Hindi “kapra” or Quechua “P’acha” that carry different cultural associations. The term “textile” often appears only when these materials enter elite spaces—museums, fashion shows, academic conferences—marking a linguistic border between makers and markets, tradition and modernity.
What made our symposium presentations particularly energizing was the audience response. TSA members asked probing questions about implementation: How would we ensure authentic community participation? What mechanisms would prevent the public platform from becoming another extractive academic project? How could we balance scholarly rigor with accessibility? These weren’t just polite queries but genuine engagement with the ethical and practical challenges we’d been grappling with since the beginning inception of Narrative Threads.
The discussion also revealed how deeply institutional practices of categorization and display have shaped public understanding of global textiles, often reinforcing hierarchical distinctions between “art” and “craft,” “Western” and “non-Western” traditions. One community member, an extraordinarily skilled Indigenous weaver of the Navajo nation, Lynda Teller Pete, shared in community meetings prior to the symposium how she’d struggled to find appropriate terminology for tapestry techniques passed down through her family that didn’t quite match any standard glossary definitions.
Another participant and group mentor, an esteemed museum curator, Melinda Watt, described the constant challenge of making textile exhibitions meaningful for diverse audiences when the available vocabulary feels either too technical or too simplistic. These interventions reinforced our conviction that Narrative Threads addressed a real need in our field and why it had to be more than just another digital repository—it had to actively challenge these inherited frameworks.
The platform we envision would grow through both open calls and targeted commissions, ensuring representation from historians, curators, artists, and—crucially—community knowledge holders often excluded from formal textile scholarship. Each entry would be multilayered, offering not just definitions but stories, demonstrations, and unpacking of cultural contexts. A search for “ikat,” for instance, might yield a video of Indonesian makers explaining their process in Bahasa, a Oaxacan weaver discussing the technique’s pre-Columbian arrival in Mexico, a conservation scientist analyzing dye chemistry, and a fashion designer reflecting on cultural circulation and appropriation—plural narratives, all coexisting without hierarchy.
The multimedia approach serves particular purposes. It would not only make the platform more accessible to people with different learning styles and abilities, but would enable preserving forms of knowledge—gestural, sonic, tactile—that text alone cannot fully capture. Most importantly, it allows contributors to share knowledge in their own voices and languages, resisting the constraints of translation for broad public audiences that reduces complex cultural concepts.
Of course, we acknowledged the challenges ahead. The current political climate, with its resistance to diversification initiatives and multicultural frameworks, presents obvious obstacles. Funding for projects that explicitly center decolonial and anti-racist methodologies has become increasingly scarce. As we write this in 2025, the institutional landscape that once supported such innovative digital humanities work has shifted dramatically.
Yet the enthusiasm at the symposium suggested that Narrative Threads speaks to something essential in our field’s evolution. The Textile Society of America, with its 38-year history of fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and its commitment to global perspectives, provides the ideal intellectual home for this project. Our 900+ international members represent exactly the kind of diverse expertise and experience that Narrative Threads aims to amplify.
Moving forward, we’re adapting our strategy to current realities while maintaining our core vision. We’re considering a phased approach, perhaps beginning with a smaller pilot that can demonstrate proof of concept. We’re also investigating alternative funding models, including crowd-funding and community-supported development.
But regardless of institutional support, the conversations sparked at the symposium confirmed that the ideas behind Narrative Threads have already begun reshaping how our community thinks about textile knowledge. Several attendees have reached out about organizing regional workshops to document local textile vocabularies. Others are experimenting with multimedia documentation in their own research and teaching.
What became clear during our panel is that Narrative Threads is more than a digital platform—it’s a provocation to reconsider whose knowledge counts, which languages matter, and how we might build more inclusive futures for textile scholarship. By questioning the assumed neutrality of textile terminology, by insisting on multiple perspectives, by collaboratively centering makers’ own words and worlds, Narrative Threads challenges us all to weave more ethical and inclusive approaches to the textiles we study, create, and love.
Sarah Molina (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, where she specializes in the study of textiles from the early modern Islamic world. Her research focuses on the many ways that carpets shaped experiences of space in Safavid Iran. She was the 2024-2025 Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow in History of Art and Visual Culture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Matthew Raj Webb (he/him) is an anthropologist and filmmaker whose research focuses on intercultural dynamics connecting South Asian and North American textile and fashion institutions. His current book project examines the evolution of fashion design practices and pedagogy in India, in the context of debates about decolonization, labor value, and historical justice. He holds M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from New York University, and is the 2025-26 Polaire Weissman Fellow in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
