Resistive Threads: Electronic Streetwear as Social Movement Material

Textiles have long been a contested technological craft. Woven, knit, crocheted, embroidered, sewn, fabric artifacts reflect an intricate process of production and development tied to skillful handwork, inventive instrumentation, and industrial manufacturing. But they also reflect longstanding histories of patriarchal stratification and control that textile artists have long sought to overcome and rework [15]. As art historian Rozsika Parker [94] observes, “to know the history of embroidery is to know the history of women” (ix). Her comment refers to the century-long demotion of threadwork to the realm of feminized domesticity and the accordingly devalued domain of decorative arts. Shifting from the home to the factory, this differential treatment lives on in the computing industry which, like the garment industry, relies on a racialized and feminized workforce, often compelled by colonial legacies of manufacturing [71].

In response, artisans have actively reclaimed, undone, and remade textile tools and materials as seeds of social movement-building. From the burlap-backed tapestries of the Chilean arpilleristas [2, 3], to the encoded escape routes for enslaved Black Americans of the contested Freedom Quilt [70], to the Changi Prison Quilts that prisoners crafted in Japan during World War II [24], textiles have long served as sites for protest, activism, and political organizing, raising provocative questions for social and ethical possibility. In Julia Bryan-Wilson words: “What does it mean to imagine the sewing needle as a dangerous tool and to envision female collective textile making as a process that might upend conventions, threaten state structures, or wreak political havoc?” [12]. Our work takes up this question and its attendant concern for minoritarian collectivity within the context of US urban social movements with an emphasis on housing justice. In particular, we build upon the work of Tania Pérez-Bustos, Laura Juliana Cortés, and colleagues who work with e-textiles as a relational method of inquiry to support oral storytelling and healing in the aftermath of Colombian warfare [19, 21, 74, 75, 78] (see Remendar lo Nuevo [76, 77]). We draw inspiration from these projects while working on the (Dis)location Black Exodus zine refashioned into a streetwear staple: the denim jacket.

Denim jackets have long been sites of creative resistance in urban contexts [83]. In 1998, Rhemi Post, Maggie Orth, and colleagues designed a denim jacket as a wearable instrument to play music via an embroidered keypad built with resistive yarns, sensors, speakers, a MIDI synthesizer, and more [73, 82]. Soon thereafter in 2000, Flavia Sparacino and colleagues designed “wearable cinema/wearable city” as a denim jacket, consisting of an embedded central processing unit, head-mounted display, and other parts to simulate immersion in a city while watching a movie from inside the set [98]. These works have laid fruitful ground for other e-textiles work on urban justice and expressive storytelling.

A growing body of e-textiles work has materialized tangible narratives as cultural artifacts, in some cases through physical embodiment [17] and others through screen mediation. Some works have looked to augment textiles craft with storytelling mechanisms that smartphones offer such as capturing traces of a creative knitting process [91, 92], and prompting inspiration to thread stories in the form of embroidered text messages [61]. Of particular relevance to our genre is Brett Halperin's interactive storytelling streetwear designed to amplify counter-cultural voices through embroidered QR codes that, when scanned with smartphone cameras, link to motion graphics and music in AR/VR/3D environments; his work calls for reorienting storytelling power amid mass cultural appropriation and co-optation of streetwear [45]. While his work and others suggest how screen mediation (e.g., smartphones or body-based monitors) might augment textiles, Laura Devendorf and colleagues importantly note the undesirability of wearing screens [26].

Prior work suggests that embedding physical computing into textiles without screen interference might render storytelling in more intimate and uninterrupted ways. Afroditi Psarra, Daniela Rosner, and colleagues, for instance, have shown how intimate material encounters [8] can unravel the sensing of textures and politics [86], as well as the (re/un)making of memories [93] and reorientation of bodies through techno-poetic engagements with fabric [85, 89]. Along with embodied making, Alexandra Riggs and colleagues have fashioned interactive wearable buttons that elevate queer histories of activism [88]. While these works illuminate embodied crafting and tangible narrative tactics [90], they only begin to scratch the surface of how e-textiles might be oriented toward collective memory and action [50].

Integrating the two traditions of textile-making and community-building presents opportunities for crafting alternative computational logics [80] across boundaries [81, 100]. Prior work has shown how e-textiles might address social problems in material, metaphorical, and practical ways. These works include speculating spiritual technologies “in the interests of Blackness” [16]; situating meanings of reconciliation [19]; refiguring ways of knowing the body through music [54]; materializing memoirs of struggle [25]; crafting ecologies of care [39] and resistance [40]. Angelika Strohmayer argues that the plurality of community voices crafted into a digitally-augmented Partnership Quilt conveys the import of telling multiple stories via a single text [99], which has become increasingly vital as computing complicates how housing struggles are narrated [46, 47]. Drawing inspiration from these works, we use the denim jacket as a site for probing relationships to the body, digitally mediated storytelling, and US urban social movements for housing justice.

Much design research has investigated urban media technology through modes of community-engagement, collective organizing, and speculative futuring [10, 13, 14, 33, 55, 56]. From designing data visualization and geographic information systems (GIS) [31, 32, 44, 48, 63, 95] to digitally supporting collective storytelling [28, 46, 67, 107], this body of work has grappled with the possibilities and pitfalls of community-based research. In such contexts, Eve Tuck calls for suspending damage-centered research, which is “research that intends to document peoples’ pain and brokenness” [105] with perhaps earnest but misguided intentions. Tuck not only calls for suspending deficit frames and narratives of “marginalized” groups as depleted without agency, but also the continued portrayals of communities of color as damaged and defeated as these approaches might do more harm than good over the long run [ibid].

Designing in community contexts such as displacement thus calls for critically considering who gets to future, and what role technology might play in futuring, but not forcing a “techno-fix” of inequities that Black communities in particular face [22, 51, 104]. The rise of “smart cities” [34, 52, 106] along with the automation of gentrification and deployment of algorithmic technologies to surveil and incriminate low-income tenants [59, 66] has made it ever more crucial to design what Erin McElroy describes in relation to the AEMP's work as “technologies of the otherwise that produce antiracist imaginaries and materialities” [65]. The AEMP has reflected upon how designing technologies of the otherwise means rejecting status quo design methods [58] and values entangled with Silicon Valley techno-capitalism that have fueled displacement [48]; it also entails probing the raciality of automation and the potential harms of scaling technology in organizing contexts that depend upon situated, localized (non-universalized) action and knowledge [35, 46]. From these works, we learn about how community-based technology can augment, rather than automate, bodies with space and place-based artifacts that are concerned not with scaling, but materializing alternative imaginaries.

With approaches like social justice-oriented interaction design [29, 36], prefigurative design [4], and design justice [20], prior work offers rich insights on how design might amplify the work of community organizations and grassroots movements. In the context of urban housing justice, Mariam Asad and Chris Le Dantec telegraph the importance of designing for existing activist practices, rather than installing new ones with technology [5]. This insight dovetails with what Daniela Rosner theorizes as “extensions”—or modes of extending community-based scholarship into meaningful forms of cultural artifacts (e.g., zines) that belong to communities, while orienting design toward activism [38, 90]. With respect to design activism, digital storytelling has played an integral role in “challenging false narratives and exposing realities” [67]. However, as Christina Harrington and colleagues have found, there are significant “barriers to obtaining narratives” about precarities in urban communities of color due to stigmas and fears of landlord retaliation [51]. It is thus crucial for grassroots movements to document the stories in some fashion. As David Philip Green and colleagues have shown, grassroots digital production systems produce stories that are more “intimate” and “realistic” than those of professional production systems [43]. Design scholars have also shown that documenting community histories can archive counter-narratives about urban inequities that might otherwise not be recorded [33, 63], as well as amplify local voices to influence change [37]. To address challenges that can arise in such processes, Sucheta Ghoshal and colleagues envision a grassroots technology practice that involves critically analyzing structural exclusion [41], while examining “artifacts and practices for the politics that they embody” [42]. As these works call for understanding what cultural artifacts embody, mobilizing grassroots stories, and extending community organizing practices, they have only begun to reveal what embodied technology (namely e-textiles) might bring to urban contexts.

This turn to the embodied technology of e-textiles considers the means by which urban environmental movements might refashion or remediate toxic conditions and systems, a process that we might call remediation. In design research, remediation has variously referred to the repair of environmental degradation [87] and hegemonic systems (e.g., through community-based translation work [101]), as well as (via [9]) the reworking of older media into newer forms of media such as e-textiles [96].

In reformatting the AEMP's (Dis)location Black Exodus print zine [84] into a wearable digital media artifact, we draw upon Erin McElroy's discussion of remediation in an environmental sense with respect to the zine, as well as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's conceptualization of remediation in a critical cultural sense as a “formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” [p.273][9]. In threading these perspectives, we assess what it means to refashion both a print zine and analog textiles into electronic streetwear by comparing the forms of media reception. While calling for alternative imaginaries of technology that are anti-racist, McElroy writes about a neighborhood foregrounded in the zine: “Today, the [Bayview-Hunters Point] neighborhood contains some of the city's highest toxin rates, due to its former shipyard and failed remediation” [65]. McElroy further describes how activists such as Marie Harrison (whose story is featured in the zine and our wearable) organized against the unremediated toxins before passing away from the health effects of environmental racism [65, 84]. In drawing these connections between remediation as environmental and cultural analytics, we set out to investigate the possibilities around refashioning legacy media in both of these senses.

We draw from an integrative approach to design inquiry that includes community-based collaborative design of a wearable probe (interviews connected with Resistive Threads). In the spirit of RtD, we use our design process to produce knowledge—neither to inform product development and manufacturing [108] nor to “solve” systemic inequities with a techno-fix [69]. Through the making and probing of electronic streetwear, we endeavor to understand its potential roles and material trajectories in US urban social movements that are already engaged in cultural production projects.

3.1.1 Immersion Within the AEMP. Our work involved immersion within the AEMP, a collaborative process of turning the zine into a wearable, and one-on-one interviews with 10 community partners alongside a discussion and demonstration of Resistive Threads. The jacket production began with AEMP's (Dis)location Black Exodus zine, which traces long histories of racial expulsion, exclusion, inequity, and incarceration, as well as resistances among Black residents in the San Francisco Bay Area [84]. Halperin, Rhodes, Leshne, and Rosner had previously worked with the AEMP on various projects over the years, with Halperin first joining the New York City chapter in 2020. In 2022, the collective asked Halperin to design a way to extend and foster experiential moments of engagement with (Dis)location Black Exodus content. A subgroup of AEMP volunteers and zine makers including Halperin noticed connections between racialized dispossession and street style [53], prompting the idea to expand and reformat the zine as a lyrical artifact of narrative streetwear. We, as a team of Black and white co-authors (including AEMP members and a creator of the zine), worked with additional Black AEMP members and creators of the zine. We also worked with multi-racial partners at other sites of community partnership. We thus formed a multi-city coalition including Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, St. Louis, and the San Francisco Bay Area. We interviewed seven partners affiliated with the AEMP (and other organizations), including four who worked on the zine. Additionally, we interviewed three partners who are community organizers at other organizations. Our interlocutors ranged from ages 28 to 66; six identify as Black, four as disabled, and three as having previously lived unhoused. We note these identities because of their particular relevance to urban space, place, and race.

Visual mockup of electronic jacket with LilyPad MP3, embedded speakers, and interactive patches sewn with conductive thread.

We took an analytical approach inspired by André Brock's critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) [11] and Adele Clarke's situational analysis [18]. Viewing our interlocutors not as “users” but instead as co-theorizers, we conducted a multimodal analysis to foreground culturally and socially contingent interpretations of electronic streetwear. This involved applying critical cultural frameworks to both our analysis of the artifact (Resistive Threads) and the discourse surrounding it (interview transcripts) [11]. To arrive at themes that follow, we used techniques from situational analysis for mapping the visual and material discourse surrounding the artifact, as well as identifying concerns for social organizing, speculation, and positioning. Heeding to Clarke's analysis of remediation as a cultural analytic (via Bolter and Grusin [9]), we paid attention to how refashioning older media can reinscribe conventional forms of oppression (e.g., racism, ableism, etc.) that are “gussied up” in new forms of representation [18, pg.276]. Altogether, this multimodal approach allowed us to analyze how social movement organizing is embedded with woven, aesthetic, and electronic signifying practices, as well as what pitfalls and potentials e-textiles might materialize within this context of US urban social movements.

Some interlocutors perceived electronic streetwear as a community organizing instrument. In practical terms, they spoke to how Resistive Threads might amplify existing practices such as exhibiting community art, advocating, and rallying constituents. They also conveyed its potential as a movement-building mechanism to shift narratives, advance sociocultural change, and support disabled organizers in carrying around information.

As AEMP members, Ariel, Rose, and Ali, spoke to how the zine was born out of a larger vision for organizing around the content through experiential moments of public engagement (e.g., online, in a classroom, or at an exhibition). Given the low-resources of the collective, however, they shared that many of their visions for digital expansion in particular were never fully realized. In turn, they saw the jacket as a way to materialize some of their practical visions for extending the zine (materially, spatially, and conceptually). Rose spoke to how she saw the conductive thread of the jacket expanding upon the collages and thread motif that run throughout the zine. She said: “As I understood [Resisitve Threads], it's something about the thread here that's allowing for these stories to be played. So I think that's such great building upon that theme... and the patchwork collage effect that is happening on the jacket.” Rose is referring to the central role of thread in both the zine and the jacket. For most e-textiles garments, including this jacket, the material relies on the fact that a thread holding fabric parts together also works as a wire carrying electricity. With her comment, Rose connects the thread metaphor running across the zine and the thread material in electronic streetwear. Rose is getting at how the jacket uses thread (metaphor and material) to expand existing organizing practices by documenting and sharing Black residents’ urban experiences, rather than introducing new practices altogether. She also mentioned how she had hoped for future iterations of the (Dis)location Black Exodus series to go beyond San Francisco. She appreciated how the jacket incorporated the voices of Black artists in other cities. Practically, our interlocutors perceived electronic streetwear as extending the AEMP's existing work and unrealized visions to animate the content as part of its ongoing organizing objectives.

Our interlocutors also had different ideas around how electronic streetwear might engage and expand public involvement in social movements. Jodi, a disabled organizer in Seattle who has lived without housing, described how she imagined wearing it to draw attention and raise awareness among everyday people. She said:

I organize just by talking... and other people would be coming straight up to me going: ‘Oh, my gosh! Can I read your jacket?’ And I'd be like ‘Yeah, actually, it's interactive. What do you want to learn?’... I'd wear it everywhere. I'd wear this to go get gas... to Costco to get my medication... to the hospital to my transfusions... I'd wear it everywhere because that's the type of organizing I do... I'm constantly engaging the randoms... because a lot of them have no idea what is going on... People are going to be hearing it, and that's going to grab their attention and then they're going to start asking the questions and that's the bigger picture... I think it can really get a lot more people maybe involved... learning stuff and just understanding and changing the narrative because that's what the most important thing is...

Jodi saw the jacket as an opportunity to engage the people (“randoms”) whom she encounters on her daily excursions, whether at the hospital or grocery store. While this substantiates prior work on how social wearables can attract the attention of strangers (e.g., [23, 30]), in this context, the spectacle may also facilitate impromptu organizing. While Jodi focused on strangers, Rita imagined the jacket supporting her constituents in need. As a founder of a grassroots tenant rights organization in St. Louis, Rita emphasized the importance of connecting the jacket to material impact for tenants. She contemplated how audiences might meaningfully benefit from the jacket by learning about their rights in the process of interacting with it. She made this point particularly clearly when she said that if the jacket intends to foster joy through music, then that means it has to “take the pain away.” For her, healing involves tangible collective action, beyond the gesture of touching a patch and listening to a song or story. Thus, Rita suggested that the jacket ought to exist in a social setting like a teach-in, where tenants learn to take specific steps to improve their situations through either direct engagement with the patches or mentorship and programming alongside it.

Close-up shot of interaction with screen-printed patch of Dr. Raymond Tompkins portrait to play his oral history aloud.

Interlocutors also reflected on how electronic streetwear might expand existing advocacy practices that focus on overturning false and harmful narratives, while celebrating new and liberatory ones as well. Rose and Rachel both spoke to how organizers often wear graphic tees with the faces of loved ones who have experienced injustices to show love and support for them. As Rachel mentioned, the graphic tees represent certain values in durable material that can be worn and thus mobilized in different places and spaces over time. In turn, they both saw the electronic jacket as amplifying this practice by making graphics more expressive and audible. As Matthew explained, fashion presents fruitful grounds for grassroots movement-building by way of cultural production. He said: “The last ten years of my homelessness, I've been involved with street poetry, clothes, fashion. Grassroots is amazing. Pop culture don't got nothing on grassroots because it comes from the street.” Matthew saw opportunity for electronic streetwear to enact cultural change from the ground up via everyday interactions on the street. Meanwhile, Richard shared a story about a community-based initiative called the Laundromat Project, which worked with the Housing is a Human Right project to play oral histories about housing in a laundromat to foster collective listening in a space, where people were united around clothing. In witnessing people at the laundromat, Richard said: “They went from staring at their clothes in the machine going around in circles to their ears pinned to these speakers in corners of the room.” In explaining how the stories “mesmerized” people, he said that he observed that listening to the stories made more people become willing to share their own stories that counter dominant narratives. He thus envisioned electronic streetwear having a similar effect in terms of captivating attention, destigmatizing experiences, and reshaping culture: “Culture, I understand, is a big part of this... It attracts the younger audience, which we need... So many university students in the city of New York are either homeless or at risk of homelessness, but they've been shamed into not sharing their stories.” Thus, several interlocutors viewed electronic streetwear as holding the practical potential to embolden grassroots activities.

Additionally, our interlocutors described how they imagined canvassers and advocates, including themselves, wearing electronic streetwear while attending community events, rallying, knocking on doors, and more. For instance, Jodi described how she saw it augmenting her advocacy work by not only starting conversations, but also carrying information around. In imagining wearing it to rallies, she said: “[It seems] easy for those of us, especially with disabilities, to be able to use because... sometimes my arms don't work at all.” Here, Jodi is envisioning the wearable nature of the jacket and its built-in speakers providing an accessible way for her to amplify stories at rallies instead of carrying equipment (e.g., a megaphone or speakers). She foresaw the latent potential for it to support disabled organizers in particular.

Lastly, Rachel described how she envisioned electronic streetwear facilitating physical interaction that fosters a communal sense of togetherness. In envisioning how the jacket might be used at a community event or rally, she said:

I think it's really moving to be able to generate audio like that without picking up your cell phone and having to play a video and share it that way... Instead of having everyone look at their own little devices and get their own meaning from things, I think it helps in the shared meaning and the shared experience... that would allow people to still be present... One person could xplay this and everybody could link arms [in a circle]... and... be in collective action without having to be distracted and defer away from that collectiveness to hear this story.

What Rachel is getting at is how personal devices with small screens engender a sense of individualism that runs counter to collective movement-building and interrupts social presence. She interpreted the jacket as a media player that can radiate outward onto a group since it does not confine an individual to looking down and inward at a screen. Even if only one person wears the jacket, it still allows for that person to be physically present and project the audio outward in shared space. Rachel thus saw potential for the screenless embodied technology to tangibly build community.

In this section, we probe the augmented denim jacket as a speculative garment, inviting reflections on wider notions of bodily expression, namely electronic streetwear, and associated imaginaries. By imaginaries we refer to constructions of particular understandings of the world, which involve concerns for what bodies desire but may never attain [6, 7, 62, 64].

4.2.1 Reembodied Reception. Our interlocutors imagined what it might be like to wear the jacket, and what it might open up as a reembodied mode of reception holding the possibility to deepen bodily connections with the woven storytellers, as well as with one's inner self and other people who encounter it being worn.

As a participatory artist, designer, and researcher from San Francisco who worked on the zine, Ariel spoke to how the AEMP has long contemplated how it can “support both deep and intentional listening” to oral histories, while also questioning what might become possible with different modalities. In thinking about listening through the jacket versus other apparatuses (e.g., headphones or screens), Ariel explained:

I just would imagine that the people's voices would be more deeply felt, as opposed to some of the more disembodied ways of listening... Whereas, this way of listening, where you're physically connected to the audio in some way... I would imagine you could feel the vibrations of the audio.

With this vision for enwrapping wearers in sonic waves, Ariel imagined tactile and audible reception grounded in bodily sensations that electrify and amplify connections with the speakers (both the storytellers who speak and the electroacoustic transducers sewn onto the shoulders). In this way, she envisioned the jacket fostering a sense of listening that travels not only through ears and eyes, but also arms, torsos, and other body parts to enhance connectedness.

With a shared outlook, Rose, a geography scholar from San Francisco who worked on the zine, described how she foresaw the wearable material extending and deepening connections with the featured storytellers, as well as with one's inner self and others who encounter it being worn—or what Marvin, a San Francisco-based artist who also worked on the zine, described as “the potentiality of the interactions it provides.” Having experienced eviction while growing up in public housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rose first spoke to how she imagined the jacket helping to preserve personal memories: “There is an incredible amount of loss here when you're talking about displacement and how do people hold onto the material things and memories... Clothing is such a clever way to think about carrying on those memories. Sometimes you can't reclaim those places.” Rose perceived the jacket as a fitting extension of the zine because of how, in her view, it is a “natural complement” to other aspects of Black culture that she has engaged in (e.g., making t-shirts to honor people who pass away and airbrushing family members onto garments at graduation to signify “carrying them with you”). In bringing the jacket full of memories across places and spaces, she further imagined it fostering comfort amid the discomfort of displacement, while opening up opportunities to socialize these issues with other people. She said: “There's something very comforting about having something on, and to be able to interact with it, have other people ask you about it, and what that opens up.” Here, Rose imagines the act of wearing the jacket as a social performance that generates meaningful conversations and connections. With this vision, Rose conveyed how the body might carry, store, and share memories through the jacket as a way of holding onto parts of what gets lost in the communal upheaval.

Similarly envisioning the jacket as a mode of inhabiting and traversing urban space, Richard and Matthew compared the electronic jacket to other forms of media reception. Richard, a long-time activist and educator part of the AEMP NYC chapter who had lived unhoused for three years, spoke to how he imagined listening and walking around with the ”stories just radiating out” such that it sparks conversations. He added: “I could just imagine sitting around like 24th street in the Mission District just tapping my jacket to hear a different story.” In visualizing himself moving through the city with the jacket on and evoking his sense of touch, he communicated a reembodied mode of engagement. Likewise, Matthew, an artist part of the AEMP NYC chapter who had lived unhoused for 10 years, characterized the artifact as “singing clothes.” He imagined the jacket offering a personalized mode of listening, inhabiting, and traversing cities that “takes the pressure off you walking around with your phone or... with something always in your ear.” In speaking to how wearers can listen to the audio tracks without having to plug into phones or hook wires up to their eardrums, he conveyed how it might facilitate a reembodied experience of the music. Together, Matthew and Richard articulated visions for the jacket to activate bodily sensations while moving through urban spaces and places.

Close-up shot of interactive patches connected to Leshne's eviction story juxtaposed with his song about feeling infinite.

Some interlocutors had contrasting ideas around questions of whom electronic streetwear ought to be for with respect to race and where it ought to be situated in urban space. We explored this question with our Black interlocutors in particular because of how the jacket foregrounds Black histories. Discussing possibilities raised critical questions surrounding who should wear or encounter it and in what places. Viewpoints differed in terms of whether it ought to focus only on Black communities versus work to build a multi-racial coalition. While Ariel voiced the import of only Black communities wearing it, Rose and Marvin agreed but with caveats that some non-Black people might also meaningfully engage with electronic streetwear. Meanwhile, Richard described how framing urban inequities foregrounded in the jacket, namely houselessness, as a class rather than racial struggle might make a greater impact.

The electronic denim jacket from the back, being worn outside on the street.

Ariel spoke to how the jacket concerns positionality in particular ways. She questioned what it might mean for Black versus non-Black people to wear or encounter it. She said that she felt strongly about it being for Black people because of how it could otherwise be co-opted, explaining:

There's always this ickiness I feel around... that liberal POV of... if white people just heard more stories of Black suffering... then they would care... If this were placed in a space that was patronized by white people, the project then becomes or feels like that is what it is being instrumentalized to do like: ‘Oh this is just a way to help white people empathize with the Black struggle’... It feels like its rightful place is in the communities whose stories it centers and that its function is to be a tool for them to feel witnessed, seen, connected, but the jacket is not a vehicle to make non-Black people care.

Ariel is describing both the importance that it is Black people with personal connections to the histories (racially and spatially) who wear the jacket, and the pitfalls of people with non-Black identities wearing it. To protect its integrity, she saw the jacket as rightfully belonging at a place like the African-American Art and Culture Complex or a Black community center (e.g., a YMCA) in a San Francisco neighborhood where some of the stories are situated. While suggesting that this might appropriately position the jacket, she also voiced concerns about how public spaces cannot “control” who enters and engages with it.

Marvin and Rose voiced related concerns around how the jacket could be co-opted, but also expressed potential for non-Black audiences to meaningfully interact with it. Marvin said:

I was initially being like someone who would be wearing this would be someone from the [Black] community... But if it wasn't someone from the community... they could be doing some canvassing work for the project... Why not wear it if you could use it in a way that would help you connect with people to maybe make a difference with the issue? I wouldn't take it off the table.

While Marvin later added that the jacket “could be anywhere” but with the risk of “co-opt[ation] for commercial use,” Rose had shared concerns. She reflected on how she worried about the zine becoming just another “book on white people's coffee table” and viewed the jacket as potentially holding a similarly undesirable fate. Rose emphasized a tension between fashion aesthetics and public exhibition. She first thought about how museums often exhibit Black art and how the jacket might spark meaningful conversations in public spaces. But then she voiced more uncertainty around how fashion aesthetics might be reductive and superficial. Rose said:

I think there's public or some semi-public spaces that this can be in, and people could come and engage with it... But... aesthetics in fashion is a real challenge in terms of just the whole intent being reduced to just aesthetics... or just signaling... and not really about learning about these issues, empathizing, and wanting to have conversations about doing justice work... I would hope that non-Black people might question their desire to just put on a jacket like this and walk around.

Rose is voicing concerns around how non-Black people might appropriate the jacket for voyeuristic exhibitionism by exploiting it as a spectacle. She is also describing how fashion aesthetics, in particular, lend themselves to forms of surface-level engagement, which might be incompatible with deep reflection about systemic inequities. This augments what Kevin said with respect to Hip Hop and the tendency for Black culture to be “commodified and sanitized and diluted in a way where it evolves into something that is the opposite of what it originally was.” While both Rose and Marvin saw potential for the jacket to engage self-reflexive patrons and advocates of all races in justice work, they also relayed hesitation about how non-Black people might degrade or exploit its affordances.

Meanwhile, for practical reasons, Richard felt strongly about the jacket not only engaging but also representing audiences of all races to build a larger coalition. First, Richard suggested that the jacket include patches with faces and stories of people who are not Black because of how US urban inequities like housing are about race and class. He explained why he viewed this as a practical distinction based on his years of houselessness and decades of activism.

A face of somebody who's white sharing a story... is important because... housing... has always been a race and class issue... We saw the government react because middle class white women were being forced out of their homes in the Bay Area and were living in tents. And all of a sudden the government was like ‘Oh, my God’... It's important to bring in different racial and ethnic backgrounds into the storytelling because... it raises awareness that this is happening not so much to a specific group of people, but to a lot of people... Maybe it is another jacket that is interracial...

Richard thus thought that, for practical reasons, incorporating more diverse groups in electronic streetwear endeavors might make it more effective at persuading people in power with a bigger coalition. Moreover, he shared his ideas for organizers who are protesting on the streets and in multi-story buildings, as well as people who have lived without housing, to wear it. In framing housing as also a class struggle, Richard suggested that people of all races should be represented in and invited to wear electronic streetwear insofar as they are inhabiting and organizing on the streets.

Close-up shot of quote from Third Author's story painted on jacket: “I didn't ever think that I'd be able to live in my hometown again... This is kind of miraculous.”.

We see opportunities for using e-textiles design practice to engage solidarities and legacies of practice that have long helped heal damage-centered research traditions. By damage-centered research, we refer back to what Tuck defines and critiques as “research that intends to document peoples’ pain and brokenness” [105], which community-based design scholars have also called for moving beyond [103] and rethinking [48]. One problem with documenting people's pain and brokenness is that researchers may reproduce that suffering by holding those impacted responsible for the oppression that they are experiencing rather than those in positions of power. In the context of housing insecurity, this insight would mean holding the racial capitalist system to account, which is a seemingly insurmountable task for an e-textile artifact.

One reading of Tuck's argument focuses on the rehearsing of painful lived experience and the suggestion that in this rehearsal the researchers take aspects of agency and personhood away from the people whom they study. As poignantly exemplified by the arpilleras that women crafted in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship [2], textiles practices can facilitate resistance, community-building, storytelling, and trauma processing.Examples of historical textile-based storytelling such as these illustrate how one's self-documentation of their own lived experience, often through creative means, can make visible otherwise hidden stories and elevate the people who tell them. For design research, this connection suggests engaging with a wider range of textile histories as ways of expanding and critically interrogating design legacies. This suggestion offers a provocation for engaging genealogies of textile practices that feminized and minoritarian groups tend to practice.

Further, in her open letter to communities, Tuck uses the story of youth coveting a particular pair of sneakers (a streetwear staple) while critiquing capitalism as a way to call for a desire-based (rather than damage-based) approach to research that recognizes the complexities and contradictions of people. This approach is meant to center people's hopes and dreams in spite of oppression. Building wearables specific to housing advocacy, Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko introduced the 1991 Poliscar as a tank-like vehicle with a rotating top that conjured enhanced mobility, protection, shelter, and community for people without homes. While augmenting the public visibility of an ongoing housing crisis, Wodiczko's design also integrated a suit of networking tools designed to facilitate connections among people debased by the crisis. Drawing parallels with this gesture, our wearable probe invites analysts to consider what spatial engagements it supports that align with and differ from social movement strategies. For example, beyond drawing connections between distinct social geographies, which aspects of social movement action does this artifact emphasize? Recall that Rachel suggested making the probe adaptable to local narratives by simply changing the tracks or patches. While Jodi proposed wearing it at a rally, others recommended door-to-door campaigns. A garment used as an organizing tool achieves more effective outcomes by knocking on doors where the interactions are calmer and more personal might prove more effective than a garment used in large protests where multiple sensory inputs compete for recognition and visibility. Our rendition of electronic streetwear, like the sneakers and Poliscar vehicle, is implicated in the very same fraught global supply chains it helps challenge, with some of the audio tracks even narrating related harms as told from first-hand perspectives. Yet, the jacket also embodies joyful memories and music, which our interlocutors such as Ariel emphasized as essential elements to not only define people by one-dimensional (uncomplex) stories of struggle. What we make of this contradiction comes in part from the way that our interlocutors described community-engaged work with social movements as requiring both acknowledgments of harm (documenting untold histories that can include traumas of urban displacement and eviction) as well as joyous acts of remembering and imagining otherwise.

By placing textile lineages within computing conversations that emphasize scale, precision, and empiricism, we face a similar potential. As if heeding to Tuck's call, our interlocutors described the multi-dimensional audio tracks speaking for themselves by voicing interlocutors’ desires: their hopes and dreams for electronic streetwear, as well as their speculations as complex souls and beings [49]. This interleaving of devalued textile legacies alongside computing work allows us, as design scholars, to sit with our interlocutors’ (and own) sometimes conflicting desires between speculating about alternative design futures and organizing against ongoing harms. It does this in part by “exposing realities” [67] around devaluation that consistently discount and minimize embodied knowledge. But it also offers this opportunity for reflection by building from the foundational work of Remendar lo Nuevo (Mending the New) [19, 21, 74, 75, 76, 78] in their use of e-textiles embedded with digital oral histories to support communal forms of processing grief. With this project in mind, we consider how e-textiles-making and its histories can create communal spaces that operate as “improvisational technologies of healing” [76]. We look to this notion of mending, as in healing—not resolving or solving, but rather co-processing and rebuilding damage-based research.

In the shadow of traditional storytelling practices, what electronics offer the design spaces of textiles and social movement organizing requires further attention. As we know from craft scholarship, textile practices have long offered capacious opportunities for storytelling and refusal, opening spaces for community organizing and driving the development of social movements [12, 15]. As many design studies have shown, technological advances can be problematic, harmful, and detested. For instance, Daniela Rosner reflects on how in designing Spyn, a mobile phone software for knitters to record their handcraft process, older knitters resented it for rivaling their overlooked work with technology (e.g., luminescent wires) and even threatening to displace them by exposing aspects of their craft expertise that they wanted to remain a secret [90, 91, 92]. Similarly, in remediating oral storytelling traditions into a conversational storytelling agent, Brett Halperin and colleagues found that AI holds potential to harmfully rival oral historians by displacing them as well [46]. What is more, limits to access and barriers to funding around technologies like e-textiles make such design practices not always feasible, desirable, or sustainable for grassroots projects. Working with e-textiles and other technologies in these contexts requires addressing the asymmetries in power, as well as responsibilities around skills-sharing, maintenance, and repair.

In reflecting upon what e-textiles then offers relative to other forms of media, we revisit what Bolter and Grusin theorize as remediation, in their words: “Digital visual media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, and print” [9]. They further describe how, in remediating particular media (e.g., replacing, improving, remixing, or absorbing it), emerging technology can present aesthetic and economic “competition” [ibid, p.48]. In other instances, Bolter and Grusin describe this process as refashioning, using a textile metaphor to underline a shift from what we see as rivalry (creating something better) into an alternative register of reworking (making into something new). What then might it mean for e-textiles to refashion, but not rival textile-storytelling and, in this case, a print zine?

In contexts of counter-storytelling, we find digital augmentation of fabric brings a particular energy and social-performative capacity to housing justice discourse. Imagining staged performance alongside modest engagement, our interlocutors described a range of settings in which the jacket might open opportunities for enlivening their community organizing work along new axes. In the design process, we considered how electrifying textiles and reformatting a print zine accordingly can engage more bodily senses (i.e., sound) as well as social performances. We learned from our interlocutors that relative to the zine, a garment can provide comfort and bring people's stories to life rather than represent them as disembodied text or data points (e.g., on a map). Meanwhile, relative to analog textiles, a wearable allows for carrying and socializing audible stories while moving through places and spaces. These augmentations suggest that perhaps we could have even gone even further in reworking other aspects of the legacy media. For instance, in hindsight, we could have complicated Marie Harrison's periodization imprinted in the zine and translated into the jacket to memorialize her through dates of birth and death. As provocated in soulful speculation, a method that Brett Halperin and Daniela Rosner develop to consider the soul in design processes concerned with healing, people's souls are alive long before birth and after death; yet, design modes of understanding users, participants, and people often hinge on these enlightenment birth-death logics [49]. Rather than reproducing these logics, we could have troubled them more to weave new modes of electronic and spiritual signification.

That said, the print zine in its own form and textiles in their tried-and-true form without the weight or baggage of electronics bring other strengths to social movement organizing. We do not suggest that any one form is superior. Instead, we look to understand what electronic augmentation and remediation offer. Especially in light of the long historical traditions associated with textiles storytelling, we urge design scholars to consider how the work of refashioning turns oral and musical stories into new and different augmented practices—in this case, dynamic features and social performances that might enliven and electrify social movements as a collective body charged with resistive power in all senses of the word.