# Sewing the Archive

The Politics of Patents research team, under the leadership of Kat Jungnickel at Goldsmith, University of London, is researching global patent archives to reconstruct and reimagine 200 years of wearable technologies, combining big data and in-depth visual & document analysis with ethnography, interviews and practice-research.

The POP lab is a research sewing studio where the team reconstructs historical clothing inventions. Sewing the archive in the POP lab is a research method that treats the archive as a resource for emerging socio-technical, political and sensory insights that enable the team to travel into possible pasts and futures hidden within the archive. The POP lab stands in a long research tradition in the history of science & technology studies where theoretical and creative experiments like ‘reconstructions’ have been situated.

Sewing, reconstructing and reimagining historical clothing patents is one way of entering into an intimate conversation with the materiality of the archive.

This forthcoming chapter 'Sewing the Archive' will introduce the sewing practices of the POP lab and the archival conversations they facilitate.

![pop_lab.jpg](/static/images/pop_lab.jpg)