This course explores how textiles have shaped—and been shaped by—the evolving roles of women, global cultures, and human innovation. From ancient fiber technologies to contemporary textile activism, learners trace how cloth becomes a medium of identity, memory, labor, power, and resistance. Through five core texts and curated supplemental readings, the course examines fiber as both material and metaphor: a quiet technology that enabled civilization, a gendered form of labor that structured social and economic systems, and a cultural archive through which communities tell stories, uphold traditions, and express creativity.

Designed as a self-paced learning journey, Woven Worlds blends historical scholarship with tactile, reflective, and cultural exploration. Learners engage through reading, close-looking exercises, optional hands-on fiber activities, and personal reflection. The course culminates in a flexible capstone project—research, creative work, systems map, or cultural analysis—that brings together material history, lived experience, and critical insight.

Woven Worlds invites you to trace the threads that connect technology to identity, labor to culture, and the past to the present, understanding textiles not simply as objects, but as world-building forces.