Dr Mary Hanlon
Visiting Research Fellow, May - June 2026
Mary Hanlon is a College Professor in Sociology at Okanagan College in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. She has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in Sociology. Her research portfolio spans two distinct yet interrelated and interdisciplinary streams: (1) labour rights in the global fashion and apparel industry; and (2) ‘DIY Academic Archives’ (critical open-access data-sharing websites) that challenge conventional methods in qualitative research across the social sciences.
With regards to labour rights, her previous research examined the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh, a disaster that killed over 1,100 garment workers who were making clothes for export to countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom. Her current work plays with notions of fashion diplomacy to explore consumer-based nationalism in Canada following demands for so-called ‘Made in Canada’ clothing in the wake of Trump tariffs.
With ‘DIY Academic Archiving’, Mary co-leads an ongoing collaborative project on digital archives (with Dr Niamh Moore, Dr Martina Karels, and Dr Nikki Dunne), which explores how research data can be made more accessible to both research participants and wider publics. Together they have created a DIY Archive (Clayoquot Lives: An Ecofeminist Storyweb).
Project title: Clothing Canada: Unboxing stories behind clothing made in/for Canada
The fellowship will focus on building an open access digital archive to explore Canada’s complicit entanglement with labour rights violations within the fashion and apparel sector: Clothing Canada.
Canada is not well known for its fashion prowess. It has, however, garnered a reputation internationally as an effective strategic partner across global networks of trade, international development, and diplomacy. Although consumers in Canada are tied to worker exploitation in clothing manufacturing, increasingly fragmented systems of production and consumption have ensured that garment worker voices are absent from Canada’s human rights record. The archive will map Canada’s history in garment making and showcase ongoing issues, themes, and challenges.
As a creative and interdisciplinary output, the Clothing Canada archive seeks to disrupt convention in research practice and to support the amplification of garment worker voices and stories, often missing from public record. The archive will be a site of open access research, and in this initial stage will be used to showcasing secondary data (archival data and reports from non-governmental organizations, governments and industry stakeholders).
During the fellowship, Mary will also be working alongside Dr Niamh Moore and Dr Martina Karels to further explore DIY Academic Archiving. Social scientists and humanity scholars are increasingly asked to archive their data. At the same time, they are encouraged to explore open data in new ways. There is an exciting opportunity to demonstrate how digital archives can be used as a creative output to support open data in academic research.