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When Clothing Becomes Part of Research

At Sandbjerg Gods, a group of PhD students are in the middle of a workshop. They talk about their projects while moving around the room, experimenting with positions, materials, and roles.

The students are participating in a seminar organised by the PhD Council for Educational Research. The seminar focuses on research as an emergent process, and Professor Connie Svabo, founding director of FNUG, has just presented an approach to research in which knowledge is not simply produced through analysis and method, but emerges in practice: in situations and through materials.

Building on curatorial design for learning, Connie Svabo works with staging research situations in which elements such as personas, performance and clothing function as methodological tools. Here, clothing becomes a way of shaping perception, movement and attention—and thus also a way of generating knowledge.
In her own words, clothing operates as “mobile architectures of experience” that mediate the relationship between body and environment.

- I work with clothing as a mediating layer in research—as a curatorial medium that helps shape how knowledge emerges in specific situations and research practices, explains Connie Svabo, and continues:

- Clothing can play an active role in research processes, where one explores who one is as a researcher and who one is becoming. In this way, clothing becomes part of the work of knowing itself and an active element in how research unfolds. 

When Clothing Opens Up New Ways of Knowing

For many of the participants at the seminar, this approach proves to be both recognizable and entirely new as a research method.
Professor and member of the PhD Council, Nikolaj Elf, explains:

- Research is almost, by definition, emergent—that is, a process of becoming. However, it can be difficult to understand what this means in practice. Connie Svabo’s both original and engaging presentation shows that taking clothing as a starting point can open up new ways of understanding emergent processes.

He particularly highlights how the participating PhD students are immediately able to relate the approach to their own experiences:

- Several have concrete experience with this—for example, using a kind of uniform in their research. Others have experience with wearing certain clothes when working on their dissertations. So the focus on clothing opens up questions about researcher personas and identities, and about materials that become pathways to knowledge, says Nikolaj Elf.

The Researcher Is Never Neutral

Connie Svabo’s presentation has shifted how seminar participants think and work as researchers, opening their eyes to how clothing can become an active part of their research.
One of the participants, Pauline Fredskilde, a PhD student in technological literacy in Danish at TECH, Aalborg University, puts it like this:

- I have gained so much from Connie’s presentation and texts on performativity, improvisation, the schizo and the monstrous. I’ve been inspired to think more about my own process as an emergent researcher and have already begun, for example, to incorporate monstrous writing into my daily practice. The texts Connie has shared are incredibly insightful and inspiring, and her presentation has made everything even more vivid and alive.

Another participant, Astrid Emilie Schrøder, assistant professor in teacher education in Roskilde and external PhD student at the Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen, explains:

- Understanding clothing as something you can think through—not just wear—opens up a new reflection on my own position as a researcher. My intuitive attraction to one of the garments Connie brought has become a concrete starting point for examining the loyalty conflict I sometimes experience in my PhD work: on the one hand, understanding teachers’ conditions, and on the other hand, questioning their practices. The garment allows me to think through this position in a new way, says Astrid Emilie Schrøder.

In this sense, the researcher is never neutral. The body, the materials and the situation always shape what becomes possible to know.

This is also reflected by seminar participant Michelle Mari Sommer, a PhD student in educational psychology (ARTS DPU) and lecturer in teacher education at Copenhagen University College:

- In my audio recordings and field notes, I can see that my body language and way of speaking change depending on the clothing I wear. When I wear safety shoes and work trousers, I can respond precisely and ask concrete questions, and when I wear my white lace blouse and high-waisted jeans, I am quieter, more reflective and more abstract, she says.

What the three participants share is that the presentation has inspired them to work more experimentally and to reflect in new ways on their own positions as researchers.

From PhD Seminar to Practice: New Methodological Paths

Working with clothing as a research approach is, in Connie Svabo’s research environment, part of a broader methodological development within practice-based and arts-based research.
A current example is Katrine Bergkvist Borch’s PhD project, in which she has developed three researcher personas, each offering their own way of understanding both theory and empirical material. The three personas—the Biology Didactics Specialist, the Fire Bearer and the Wicked Scientist—appear in different contexts, wear specific garments, and embody distinct ways of understanding the world. This opens up three different ways of approaching science education in nature-based learning environments.

Katrine Bergkvist Borch explains:

- All three personas are me—but they are specific enactments of me—specific entanglements of myself, artefacts, landscapes and technologies. The personas are not characters, and I am not acting. They are methodological tools to think with and to generate and analyse empirical material.

- More concretely, the Biology Didactics Specialist wears outdoor clothing, boots and a backpack, and goes into the field in nature with young people. The Fire Bearer walks barefoot, preferably alone, and wears an Ice Age landscape cloak or a wave cloak designed for the project. The Wicked Scientist attends conferences, dyes her hair green, and wears a redesigned lab coat that is ‘wicked’ on the back. The coat symbolises my background in the natural sciences in contrast to the complex, fragmented, and a break with a positivist understanding of knowledge and the world, says Katrine. Read more about Katrine Bergkvist Borch’s dissertation here.

Clothing thus becomes an active methodological tool in fieldwork. Researcher personas and specific forms of dress are not used merely to illustrate analyses, but to create them. By stepping into particular roles—bodily, sensorially and materially—new ways of observing, participating and asking questions emerge.
This points to a methodological shift: from understanding method as something the researcher applies to the world, to seeing method as something that the world—and the researcher—become through.

This is precisely why the approach is effective. When the body, the material and the situation think along, access is gained to experiences and forms of knowing that cannot be reached through analysis alone. Clothing is not a supplement to research—it is part of the knowledge-producing process.

When learning is staged through materials

The video below provides an insight into Connie Svabo’s work with curatorial design for learning, illustrated through footage from the Ecoliteracy Research Festival in August 2025. In the film, for example, an animal costume with a tail shows how it becomes possible to move, sense, and relate to the surroundings in new ways.

The example from the Ecoliteracy Research Festival points to the core of curatorial design for learning:
How learning does not take place only in the mind, but in the interplay between body, materials and environment.

- By working with clothing, we draw attention to a layer of communication that is often overlooked in knowledge production—namely, how what we wear on our bodies helps shape how we experience and participate in an environment, says Connie Svabo.

Understanding Learning and Knowledge in New Ways

The work at FNUG points to a fundamental expansion of what research and learning can be. Here, knowledge is not only something found in texts and theories. It emerges in situations:

• in the body
• in the materials
• in the relationship with the surroundings

This opens up new ways of working with STEM education, where sensing, participation and creative processes become an integral part of knowledge production.
When method is no longer understood as something the researcher applies from the outside, but as something shaped in interaction with body, materials and environment, classical ideas of distance, objectivity and control are challenged. Instead, a more situated and participatory researcher role comes into view.

When We Put on Clothes, We Also Put on a Way of Knowing

Back at the seminar at Sandbjerg, the points are unmistakable. Clothing is not just something we wear. It actively shapes how we think, act and understand the world.
And perhaps this is precisely where a new form of research takes shape:
Not only as analysis—but as something lived, sensed and continuously becoming.

- I think of clothing as a body-near form of architecture,- says Connie Svabo.

For the participants, it has become clear that research does not only take place at the desk or in subsequent analysis. It unfolds in the midst of situations—in what they do, what they wear, and what they become along the way.

A lab coat, a headpiece or a tail may still be just clothing.

But in this field of research, it is also something more. It is a way of asking questions.

A way of being a researcher.

And increasingly, a way of producing knowledge.