Current research
From 2019-2025 I led an ERC Consolidator funded project called Politics of Patents: Re-imagining citizenship via clothing inventions 1820-2020.
The project website is www.politicsofpatents.org
With this funding I developed my creative STS practice research into histories of wearable technology via 200 years of patented inventions, with a focus on socio-political acts of resistance through clothing.
A distinctive feature of my research is speculative sewing: a practice-led approach that stitches theory, method, and data into wearable, three-dimensional arguments. I use making as a mode of analysis, public engagement, and knowledge exchange.
I led teams of sewing social scientists to explore past innovations to bring to life, in archival research, stories and material reconstructions lesser-known and forgotten attempts by inventors to re-design and re-imagine citizenship and attempt to change the world one stitch at a time.
Also see: POP Instagram
Recent publications
Jungnickel, K., Fowles, E., May, K and Pugh, N. 2024. Ed. Wearable Utopias: Imagining, Inventing and Inhabiting New Worlds. MIT Press. Open access
Coleman, R., and Jungnickel, K. 2024. Fabulating Feminist Futures: Research methodologies for new times, Australian Feminist Studies – Special (double) Issue. Our introduction is available as an open access PDF.
Coleman, R., Jungnickel, K and Puwar, N. 2024. (Eds) How to do Social Research with….. Goldsmiths Press.
Lammes, S., Jungnickel, K., Hjorth, L. and Rae, J. 2023. (eds) Failurists: when things go awry, Institute of Network Cultures, Open Access
The POP project has a number of recent open access journal articles out in Sociology, Sociological Review, Social Studies of Science and Science, Technology & Human Values. More here.
Contact
I can be contacted at k.jungnickel@gold[dot]ac[dot]uk
Role and work
I am a Professor in Sociology Department, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
From 2013 I have taught a range of sociology, STS and feminist technoscience and creative and inventive practice courses for UG and PG students. I have also taught and convened Criminology programs and taught Privacy, Surveillance & Security studies. My research focuses on invention, gender, mobilities and DiY/DiT technology cultures. I am particularly interested in how people imagine different futures through the use and misuse of mundane and ordinary materials, technologies and practices.
I have been studying these topics since my PhD ethnography of backyard-technologists who hand-built their own version of the internet, through a decade of freelance ethnographic work with industry, in my teaching, ESRC funded Bikes & Bloomers project about Victorian women cycle wear inventors and current ERC funded Politics of Patents project.
Making, experimenting and engaging are integral to my work. My interdisciplinary approach, methods and modes of transmission include websites, blogs, time-lapse videos, printed materials, photographs, performances, installations and, most recently, costume. At Goldsmiths, I direct the Methods Lab which supports interdisciplinary collaborations and runs events across college that experiment with inventive ways of doing social research.
Public engagement
I regularly give talks and run public engagement activities such as Show, Tell & Try On events and hacking and sewing workshops, in a range of places such as Smithsonian Museum of American History, Lemelson Centre for Invention. & Innovation (DC), London Science Museum ‘Lates’, Victoria and Albert Culture Salon and Digital Design Weekend, London Transport Museum, Feminism in London Annual Conference, London Bike Kitchen, Somerset House, London Cycle Campaign Transport Policy seminars, Field Day Music Festival, The New School (NYU), College of Art (Edinburgh), Institute of Textiles (UK), Institute of Design Projects (Warsaw), Digital Cultures Research Lab (Lüneburg), RMIT (Melbourne) and Australian Centre for Public History (Sydney).
Academic bio
I have a PhD in Sociology from Goldsmiths College (2009) for an ethnographic study of the culture of wireless technology networks.
Prior to my role at Goldsmiths I held a postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2010-11) in the Sustainable Mobilities Research Group at the University of East London on the ethnographic ESRC-funded project Cycling cultures in a mass motorised society: a multi-method case study of four English urban areas.
My interest in practice-led multi-dimensional ethnographic research draws on a BA Communications at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia (1993) and an MA in Visual Culture at the University of Westminster, London, UK (2003).