Merle Patchett
Biographic Data
| ID | 99356 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Merle Patchett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Merle |
| FAMILY NAME | Patchett |
| SIGNATURE | PATCHETT M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6662-5861 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 144 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
‘Work done by John Edmondston’: Labour, slavery and the making of natural history at the University of Edinburgh Museum, 1804–1824
This paper demonstrates how a decolonial labour history can illuminate the systemic entanglements of science with slavery and empire. To do so, it reinterprets the Natural History Museum of the University of Edinburgh (1804–24) as a site where scientific authority was produced through racialized, gendered and classed labour relations. Combining microhistorical method with decolonial critique, the article reconstructs the choreography of everyday …
"Fashion's Relation to the "Geo: From Global Impacts to Earthly Practices
This article stages a radical rethinking of the relation between fashion and the “geo.” Fashion studies, within and beyond geography, have largely articulated this relation through global modes of thought, which also deploy problematic concepts of capitalist progress, placing fashion within a linear and Eurocentric geohistory of modernization, industry and Anthropocene. Moreover, such approaches often maintain clear boundaries between humans and …
Feather-Work: A Fashioned Ostrich Plume Embodies Hybrid and Violent Labors of Growing and Making
This paper uses a fashioned ostrich plume to conceptualize and re-present ostrich “feather-work” as being co-constituted by human and non-human labor. The plume archives not only the human hands that fashioned it but also the bird-body that grew the feathers, insisting it be conceptualized and researched as a grown-made commodity. From this starting point, I reconstruct its journey along the “feather-road”: from reared and plucked ostrich on a So…
Geographies of Fashion and Style: Setting the Scene
The papers assembled in this forum examine the Geographies of Fashion and Style through texts, visual images, material objects and processes of growing and making, as lived experiences and performative practices and, crucially, as concepts and practices that travel and mutate over time and place. In this introduction, we chart the Eurocentric cultural episteme of the fashion industry and fashion studies and dismantle it by drawing on, and out, gl…
Archiving
What do animals teach us about historiography? This intervention explores this provocation by restaging a methods workshop that sought to radically rethink the archive as animal and archiving as an iteration of animal play and politics. To do so it recounts what happened when a group of human geography Master's students, armed only with a few key readings and some gloves, were introduced to a collection of feathered remains. With no interpretive …
The Biogeographies of the Blue Bird-of-Paradise: From Sexual Selection to Sex and the City
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Practising post‐humanism in geographical research
Post‐humanist theories shaping contemporary geographic research have unsettled the privileged position of the “human” as a common reference to apprehend social life. This decentring of the human demands that we rethink our expectations of, and approaches to, methodological practice and the traditional distinctions made between the theoretical and the empirical. In this introduction and the following interventions, we explore how a material situat…
Five advantages of skill
In this Special Issue we explore and extend conceptions, characterisations, and applications of skill within and beyond geography. Framed by the question: "where is skill located?", the papers assembled do not just explore where skilled practice 'takes place', its sites and situations, but also prompt a deeper ontological and epistemological rethinking of skill. And it is this rethinking of skill that is at stake in our editorial. In what follows…
The last plumassier: Storying dead birds, gender and Paraffection at Maison Lemarié
Founded in 1875, Maison Lemarié is one of the last remaining plumassiers (feather-makers) anywhere in the world. In highly concentrated and minutely detailed work, the artisans at Lemarié painstakingly treat, dye and apply fragile feathers to haute couture garments. Mindful of preserving these rarefied skills, Chanel (a global fashion empire) purchased the workshop in 1997 as part of 'Paraffection'. Paraffection, which roughly translates to 'for …
Historical geographies of apprenticeship: Rethinking and retracing craft conveyance over time and place
Taxidermy workshops: Differently Figuring the Working of Bodies and Bodies at Work in the Past
Geographers have long demonstrated an interest in charting the geographical and bodily dynamics of work and employment. However, within this scholarship very little attention has been paid to historical geographies of craftwork. This paper seeks to address this deficit while also engaging with the evident and evidentiary methodological issues associated with the historical study of practices worked through the body. To do so, the paper experiment…
The taxidermist's apprentice: Stitching Together the Past and Present of a Craft Practice
How do you witness the development and reproduction of a craft practice? This essay explores this provocation in relation to the craft practice of taxidermy and, in so doing, aims to stitch together non-representational and historical geographic concerns within the discipline. Mobilising and developing on an Ingoldian perspective on the process of skill, the author places herself in the position of apprentice to a practising taxidermist in recogn…
Speaking with specters: Experimental Geographies in Practice
Repair work: Surfacing the Geographies of Dead Animals
An artist and a geographer asked the same question: what is a zoological specimen and how can it be used? Considerable attention has been paid to the ‘finished’ form and display of taxidermy specimens inside cabinets, behind glass – in other words to their representation. We challenge the priority given to representation by getting under the skin and behind-the-scenes to show how specimens have been entangled ‘in life’ as well as how we have crea…
The taxidermist's apprentice: Stitching Together the Past and Present of a Craft Practice
How do you witness the development and reproduction of a craft practice? This essay explores this provocation in relation to the craft practice of taxidermy and, in so doing, aims to stitch together non-representational and historical geographic concerns within the discipline. Mobilising and developing on an Ingoldian perspective on the process of skill, the author places herself in the position of apprentice to a practising taxidermist in recogn…
Practising post‐humanism in geographical research
Post‐humanist theories shaping contemporary geographic research have unsettled the privileged position of the “human” as a common reference to apprehend social life. This decentring of the human demands that we rethink our expectations of, and approaches to, methodological practice and the traditional distinctions made between the theoretical and the empirical. In this introduction and the following interventions, we explore how a material situat…
Taxidermy workshops: Differently Figuring the Working of Bodies and Bodies at Work in the Past
Geographers have long demonstrated an interest in charting the geographical and bodily dynamics of work and employment. However, within this scholarship very little attention has been paid to historical geographies of craftwork. This paper seeks to address this deficit while also engaging with the evident and evidentiary methodological issues associated with the historical study of practices worked through the body. To do so, the paper experiment…
Speaking with specters: Experimental Geographies in Practice
Five advantages of skill
In this Special Issue we explore and extend conceptions, characterisations, and applications of skill within and beyond geography. Framed by the question: "where is skill located?", the papers assembled do not just explore where skilled practice 'takes place', its sites and situations, but also prompt a deeper ontological and epistemological rethinking of skill. And it is this rethinking of skill that is at stake in our editorial. In what follows…
Repair work: Surfacing the Geographies of Dead Animals
An artist and a geographer asked the same question: what is a zoological specimen and how can it be used? Considerable attention has been paid to the ‘finished’ form and display of taxidermy specimens inside cabinets, behind glass – in other words to their representation. We challenge the priority given to representation by getting under the skin and behind-the-scenes to show how specimens have been entangled ‘in life’ as well as how we have crea…
The Biogeographies of the Blue Bird-of-Paradise: From Sexual Selection to Sex and the City
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Historical geographies of apprenticeship: Rethinking and retracing craft conveyance over time and place
The last plumassier: Storying dead birds, gender and Paraffection at Maison Lemarié
Founded in 1875, Maison Lemarié is one of the last remaining plumassiers (feather-makers) anywhere in the world. In highly concentrated and minutely detailed work, the artisans at Lemarié painstakingly treat, dye and apply fragile feathers to haute couture garments. Mindful of preserving these rarefied skills, Chanel (a global fashion empire) purchased the workshop in 1997 as part of 'Paraffection'. Paraffection, which roughly translates to 'for …
Archiving
What do animals teach us about historiography? This intervention explores this provocation by restaging a methods workshop that sought to radically rethink the archive as animal and archiving as an iteration of animal play and politics. To do so it recounts what happened when a group of human geography Master's students, armed only with a few key readings and some gloves, were introduced to a collection of feathered remains. With no interpretive …
Geographies of Fashion and Style: Setting the Scene
The papers assembled in this forum examine the Geographies of Fashion and Style through texts, visual images, material objects and processes of growing and making, as lived experiences and performative practices and, crucially, as concepts and practices that travel and mutate over time and place. In this introduction, we chart the Eurocentric cultural episteme of the fashion industry and fashion studies and dismantle it by drawing on, and out, gl…
Feather-Work: A Fashioned Ostrich Plume Embodies Hybrid and Violent Labors of Growing and Making
This paper uses a fashioned ostrich plume to conceptualize and re-present ostrich “feather-work” as being co-constituted by human and non-human labor. The plume archives not only the human hands that fashioned it but also the bird-body that grew the feathers, insisting it be conceptualized and researched as a grown-made commodity. From this starting point, I reconstruct its journey along the “feather-road”: from reared and plucked ostrich on a So…
Repair work: Surfacing the Geographies of Dead Animals
An artist and a geographer asked the same question: what is a zoological specimen and how can it be used? Considerable attention has been paid to the ‘finished’ form and display of taxidermy specimens inside cabinets, behind glass – in other words to their representation. We challenge the priority given to representation by getting under the skin and behind-the-scenes to show how specimens have been entangled ‘in life’ as well as how we have crea…
Speaking with specters: Experimental Geographies in Practice
Historical geographies of apprenticeship: Rethinking and retracing craft conveyance over time and place
Taxidermy workshops: Differently Figuring the Working of Bodies and Bodies at Work in the Past
Geographers have long demonstrated an interest in charting the geographical and bodily dynamics of work and employment. However, within this scholarship very little attention has been paid to historical geographies of craftwork. This paper seeks to address this deficit while also engaging with the evident and evidentiary methodological issues associated with the historical study of practices worked through the body. To do so, the paper experiment…
The taxidermist's apprentice: Stitching Together the Past and Present of a Craft Practice
How do you witness the development and reproduction of a craft practice? This essay explores this provocation in relation to the craft practice of taxidermy and, in so doing, aims to stitch together non-representational and historical geographic concerns within the discipline. Mobilising and developing on an Ingoldian perspective on the process of skill, the author places herself in the position of apprentice to a practising taxidermist in recogn…
Five advantages of skill
In this Special Issue we explore and extend conceptions, characterisations, and applications of skill within and beyond geography. Framed by the question: "where is skill located?", the papers assembled do not just explore where skilled practice 'takes place', its sites and situations, but also prompt a deeper ontological and epistemological rethinking of skill. And it is this rethinking of skill that is at stake in our editorial. In what follows…
The last plumassier: Storying dead birds, gender and Paraffection at Maison Lemarié
Founded in 1875, Maison Lemarié is one of the last remaining plumassiers (feather-makers) anywhere in the world. In highly concentrated and minutely detailed work, the artisans at Lemarié painstakingly treat, dye and apply fragile feathers to haute couture garments. Mindful of preserving these rarefied skills, Chanel (a global fashion empire) purchased the workshop in 1997 as part of 'Paraffection'. Paraffection, which roughly translates to 'for …
Archiving
What do animals teach us about historiography? This intervention explores this provocation by restaging a methods workshop that sought to radically rethink the archive as animal and archiving as an iteration of animal play and politics. To do so it recounts what happened when a group of human geography Master's students, armed only with a few key readings and some gloves, were introduced to a collection of feathered remains. With no interpretive …
The Biogeographies of the Blue Bird-of-Paradise: From Sexual Selection to Sex and the City
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Practising post‐humanism in geographical research
Post‐humanist theories shaping contemporary geographic research have unsettled the privileged position of the “human” as a common reference to apprehend social life. This decentring of the human demands that we rethink our expectations of, and approaches to, methodological practice and the traditional distinctions made between the theoretical and the empirical. In this introduction and the following interventions, we explore how a material situat…
Feather-Work: A Fashioned Ostrich Plume Embodies Hybrid and Violent Labors of Growing and Making
This paper uses a fashioned ostrich plume to conceptualize and re-present ostrich “feather-work” as being co-constituted by human and non-human labor. The plume archives not only the human hands that fashioned it but also the bird-body that grew the feathers, insisting it be conceptualized and researched as a grown-made commodity. From this starting point, I reconstruct its journey along the “feather-road”: from reared and plucked ostrich on a So…
Geographies of Fashion and Style: Setting the Scene
The papers assembled in this forum examine the Geographies of Fashion and Style through texts, visual images, material objects and processes of growing and making, as lived experiences and performative practices and, crucially, as concepts and practices that travel and mutate over time and place. In this introduction, we chart the Eurocentric cultural episteme of the fashion industry and fashion studies and dismantle it by drawing on, and out, gl…
"Fashion's Relation to the "Geo: From Global Impacts to Earthly Practices
This article stages a radical rethinking of the relation between fashion and the “geo.” Fashion studies, within and beyond geography, have largely articulated this relation through global modes of thought, which also deploy problematic concepts of capitalist progress, placing fashion within a linear and Eurocentric geohistory of modernization, industry and Anthropocene. Moreover, such approaches often maintain clear boundaries between humans and …
‘Work done by John Edmondston’: Labour, slavery and the making of natural history at the University of Edinburgh Museum, 1804–1824
This paper demonstrates how a decolonial labour history can illuminate the systemic entanglements of science with slavery and empire. To do so, it reinterprets the Natural History Museum of the University of Edinburgh (1804–24) as a site where scientific authority was produced through racialized, gendered and classed labour relations. Combining microhistorical method with decolonial critique, the article reconstructs the choreography of everyday …
Sociology (12 works) · Art (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (8 works) · History (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Visual arts (7 works) · Archaeology (6 works) · History (6 works)