Fashion from Below - (Culture and Social Practice) by Karlotta Jule Bahnsen (Paperback)

About the Book

Bolivian migrants are transforming Buenos Aires' garment industry through cooperation, gendered agency, and transnational ties.

Book Synopsis

In Buenos Aires' garment industry, workers reshape precarious working conditions through collective organization and throughout their trajectories of migration and garment work. Moving beyond victimizing or criminalizing narratives, Karlotta Jule Bahnsen offers an ethnographic view of migrant workers' negotiations of intersectional inequalities across migration, gender, and labor, highlighting processes of transformation, transnational networks, and the hidden structures sustaining Buenos Aires' urban fashion industry. This unique perspective speaks to scholars of Latin America, informal labor in global industries, migration, and gender, while offering a vivid account of agency that resonates beyond academia.

About the Author

Karlotta Jule Bahnsen is a cultural anthropologist who earned her doctorate at the Institute of Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, where she also worked as a research associate, taught in the interdisciplinary M.A. program, and coordinated the institute's international alumni program. She is a member of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), the German Association for Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA), and the Applied Anthropology Network. Her research focuses on migration, the global garment industry, informality, and gender relations. ---