Articles

Journalist and author writing mostly about labour rights and the politics of the fashion industry. This work has taken me from Bangladesh, Kenya, and North Macedonia to the Topshop warehouses in Solihull.

Portfolio

• War On Want report - Fashioning the future - Fixing the fashion industry for workers and climate

• Sunny VK Show podcast on how to understand capitalism through fashion, to racialised violence in the industry and how much I truly despise Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel.
• One Planet podcast on Global Green New Deal, solidarity and shutting down social media feeds.
• Social Policy Worldwide Women workers transform Tamil Nadu factories in fight against gender-based violence - on the impact of The Dindigul Agreement
• Pluto Press book talk with Can fashion be anti-capitalist? with Yara Rodrigues Fowler & Nandita Shivakumar.
• XR Writers Rebel Un-fashioning The Future
• openDemocracy Heat stress fears for migrant workers persist ahead of Qatar World Cup
• openDemocracy Can urban mining help to save the planet?
• openDemocracy Violence against women garment workers increased during pandemic
• JOURNO COLECTIVO PROJECT: MAPPING THE COVID RIGHTS ROLL BACK IN THE RMG SECTOR A cross-border collaboration and a National Geographic Society funded project. Articles published in English and Spanish:

Capital & Main: Can California’s New Garment Worker Law Rein in Abuses?

Dhaka Tribune: How the West’s thirst for fast fashion is destroying lives

Jacobin Magazine: Work and Death in Sri Lanka’s Garment Industry

Underground. Periodismo Internacional: Pandemia, abuso laboral en la industria textil (Pandemic labour abuse in the textile industry)

openDemocracy: Report says soldiers shot three dead at Myanmar factory making US cowboy boots

Contra Corriente: Personas enfermas por trabajo en maquila fueron despedidas con la excusa de la pandemia (People sick from maquila work were fired with the pandemic as the excuse) -

• Winner of the Freelance Fashion & Beauty Writer Award at the inaugural Freelance Writing Awards. (June 2021)
• Completed Carbon Literacy for Journalists training. Certified Carbon Literate by the Carbon Literacy Project. (Feb 2022)
• TRIBUNE: The Fashion Debt Trap (March 2021)
• JOMEC: Cardiff University Lecture on supply chain journalism
• openDemocracy: “They left us starving”: How the fashion industry abandoned its workers (Jan 2021)
• BBC World Service: Protest Fashion: A Political Fashion Look Book (Jan 2021)
• HUCK MAGAZINE: We should all care what happens to Julian Assange (Jan 2021)
• openDemocracy: Behind the shine: how the jewellery trade relies on minerals tainted with death (Dec 2020)
• HuffPost: What Actually Happens To Your Online Returns? (Dec 2020)
• Verso Books: Bleak Friday (Nov 2020)
• Nominated for a British Journalism Award. Investigations category as part of the openDemocracy team portfolio (Nov 2020)
• Riversmeet: We Need to Talk about Shoes (Nov 2020)
• Guardian: 'Thrown to the wolves': how Covid-19 laws are being used to silence garment workers (October 2020)

• Foot Work author appearance at Appledore Book Festival (September 2020)
• Resurgence Magazine: Think On Your Feet (September 2020)
• Foot Work - Fashion Talks Book Club (September 2020)
• German speaking tour (virtual): Hamburg, Munster, Berlin
• Guardian: Covid outbreak exposes dire conditions at Guatemala factory making US brands (August 2020)
• New Internationalist: CAN WORKERS RESET THE SYSTEM? (July 2020)
• HUCK MAG Garment workers or fashion corporations? It’s time to pick a side (June 2020)
• Fashion Roundtable: OP-ED: People in Primark are not your enemy (June 2020)
• Restart project podcast: Shoes & Urgent System Change (June 2020)
• York Festival Of Ideas: Foot Work: What your shoes are doing to the world (June 2020)
• HUCK MAG: Corporations or garment workers? It’s time to pick a side (June 2020)
• openDemocracy: 'Useless' Deloitte accused of PPE failings amid COVID-19 deal secrecy (May 2020)
• Public Reading Rooms: Foot Work - What your shoes are doing to the world (May 2020)
• Fashion Roundtable: OP-ED Hypebeast" culture is creating an environmental disaster (April 2020)
• Rana Plaza Anniversary: UDITA film screening and Q&A (April 2020)
• HUCK MAG: Fast fashion hasn’t stopped putting profits over people (March 2020)
• Guardian ‘Some soles last 1,000 years in landfill’: the truth about the sneaker mountain (March 2020 - exclusive rights to Foot Work bought by the Guardian who printed an edited extract in the Weekend Magazine)

SELECTED ARCHIVE

2020 - 2014

My Top Picks:

• The i Paper: 'We're not humans any more': inside the strike at warehouse that supplies Topshop
• Al Jazeera: Westgate: Kenyan guards on the frontline
• Al Jazeera: Seeking justice for deadly Pakistan factory blaze
• Guardian: Reliving the Rana Plaza factory collapse: a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 22
• Guardian: No individual black model on cover of British Vogue since 2002
• Guardian: Old Dhaka in danger: young volunteers bid to save historic city from developers
• The i Paper: 'A Prayer Before Dawn' author Billy Moore on his time in a Thai prison (interview done inside Liverpool Prison)

• THE TRUE COST: Trailer here
• Guardian: Made in Britain: UK textile workers earning £3 per hour
• Guardian: H&M, Zara and Marks & Spencer linked to polluting viscose factories in Asia
• Guardian: Opinion Stella McCartney’s fake-fur coats are worlds away from the brutal fur trade
• Guardian: Robot factories could threaten jobs of millions of garment workers
• Guardian: Supply chain audits fail to detect abuses, says report
• Guardian: Shop until you drop: Black Friday and the call for longer opening hours
• Guardian: A cruelty-free angora fur trade may be incompatible with fast fashion
• Guardian: How the Jack the Ripper industry distorts London's East End
• Guardian: After two years, the Rana Plaza fund finally reaches its $30m target
• Guardian: Rana Plaza: are fashion brands responsible for those they don't directly employ?
• Guardian: Fashion industry is letting down people with disabilities - to its cost
• Guardian: Ethical fashion: saving South Africa’s clothing industry
• Guardian: Luxury brands: higher standards or just a higher mark-up?
• Guardian: The feminist T-shirt scandal exposes an entire system of exploitation
• Guardian: Role of business in disappearance of 50% of world's wildlife
• Guardian: Cotton production linked to images of the dried up Aral Sea basin
• Guardian: If we care about employee wellbeing, zero-hour contracts must go

• iD/Vice: UK police raid 280 nail salons in crackdown on modern slavery
• iD: in bangladesh, the people who make your clothes are striking for their rights | read | i-D
• iD: how do we ensure fashion’s diversity drive doesn’t just fetishise the new wave of models?
• iD: Op-Ed - we must keep pressure on brands to protect garment workers
• Business of Fashion: Preventing Another Rana Plaza
• Business of Fashion: Op-Ed | The Trouble with Second-Hand Clothes
• Business of Fashion: Op-Ed | Garment Workers Deserve a Global Minimum Wage
• The i Paper: The story of Billy Moore’s time in a brutal Thai prison is now a movie, but he won’t see it – because he’s back in jail
• Independent: I challenged Germaine Greer over her transphobic comments this week. Here's what happened
• Independent: Corbyn has been drawing 1,000-strong crowds in ex-mining communities - but they're poor, so it doesn't matter