Threading the Future: Repair, Resilience, and Sashiko at Birkbeck Climate Festival 2025

Rooted in the traditional Japanese practice of visible mending, Sashiko (literally, "little stabs") originated as a practical method used by working-class communities in the Edo period to extend the life of garments. Over time, it has evolved into a visible and intentional act of care—one that doesn’t hide damage but honours it. Participants at the workshop stitched together fabric, stories, and shared reflections, making both cloth and community visible in the act of repair.

In my opening remarks, I offered a provocation:

“Repair is more than just fixing what is broken. It’s about how we live with damage—how we acknowledge it, respond to it, and reimagine what healing might look like.”

The symbolism of Sashiko speaks powerfully to the climate crisis. Like our planet, the garments we worked on bore the marks of wear. Yet the mending we undertook was not about erasing that history. As in Sashiko, where the patch is not hidden but made beautiful and visible, climate repair must also reckon with past and ongoing harm, creating new stories that incorporate, rather than deny, the damage.

The climate crisis—and the extreme weather events it intensifies—is now one of the leading causes of global displacement. According to the UNHCR, 31.8 million people were forcibly displaced in 2022 alone due to weather-related hazards such as floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires. The language often used to describe these movements—‘swarms,’ ‘floods,’ ‘infestations’—mirrors not only the ecological disasters themselves but also the dehumanising metaphors that frame migration in the Global North. These figures and framings expose a deeper entanglement between environmental breakdown and colonial legacies of othering, revealing the emotional and material infrastructures that shape who is welcomed—and who is not.

This is why frameworks of care and repair are increasingly vital, especially those that challenge the logics of exclusion and extraction. Across Birkbeck, scholars are responding to this need by foregrounding more expansive and materially sensitive imaginaries of care—ones that acknowledge the hidden and often precarious infrastructures that sustain life in urban and planetary settings. In this context, the recent article by Birkbeck geographer Dr. Olivia Sheringham, “Creating Cities of Care: Towards a New Radical Care Framework for Geographical Research with Urban Migrants and Refugees”, published in Progress in Human Geography (Sheringham, 2025), offers an important perspective. Her work emphasises the temporalities, spatialities, and knowledges of care, calling for more critical and radical approaches that resist the co-optation of care into neoliberal or racial capitalist frameworks. At Birkbeck, researchers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences are exploring how to offer more resilient and inclusive frameworks for thinking about home, migration, and environmental repair. Working with materials—whether cloth, soil, or language—is not just expressive. It’s constitutive of knowledge and shared meaning.

Honouring repair over replacement

Over the course of two hours, participants in the Sashiko session learned to thread, patch, and stitch, guided by Mika’s gentle instruction and the tactile rhythm of repair. Working with the materials provided—fabric templates, needles, and thread—they practiced visible mending as both a technical skill and a reflective act. Participants left not just with new techniques, but with a deeper sense of how sustainability can be embodied through small, careful gestures that honour repair over replacement. Repair, as we saw, is not always seamless. But it can be visible, shared, and resilient. The act of slowing down, attending to detail, and crafting care into each stitch created a temporary commons—a space for thinking together about how we might respond to damage without disappearing it.

This workshop formed part of the Birkbeck Climate Festival’s wider programme, which brought together events spanning science, policy, education, and the arts to explore how interdisciplinary thinking, public engagement, and creative practice can contribute to more just, sustainable, and resilient futures. Sashiko, with its quiet insistence on dignity, care, and continuity, offered one way of doing just that—needle by needle, stitch by stitch. Across Birkbeck, a growing number of researchers are working on the politics, poetics, and practices of repair—from environmental humanities to radical geography, from performance studies to sustainability education.

If you're interested in exploring how academic research might come together with hands-on, materially grounded practices like Sashiko—whether in the form of workshops, collaborations, or public events—we would love to hear from you. Together, we can stitch new vocabularies and build new spaces of welcome, repair, and resilience. Mika also runs the Monday Mending Club, a weekly community initiative where anyone can continue exploring visible mending as a creative, reflective practice—a lovely way to reconnect with the spirit of the workshop.