Wool, Kala Cotton, and Eri Silk as Acts of Ecological Resistance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper weaves together the stories of three textile systems rooted in indigenous fibres—Kala cotton from Gujarat, desi sheep wool from Himachal Pradesh, and Eri silk from Assam—to explore how traditional practices carry ecological knowledge and cultural memory. Each fibre is deeply embedded in its landscape, shaped by the rhythms of local ecosystems and sustained through intergenerational care. Kala cotton, cultivated without irrigation or chemical inputs, is being revived by small land holding farmers in Kachchh as a form of climate-resilient and decolonial design. In Himachal Pradesh, wool practices linked to Gaddi pastoralism reflect how seasonal migration and domestic weaving nurture livelihoods and cultural identity. In Assam, Eri silk—reared and woven by Rabha women—is produced in harmony with forest systems, offering a model of ethical and feminist labour. These stories are not about nostalgia or preservation, but about sustaining slow, rooted practices in a fast-moving world. They remind us that textiles are not just material objects—they are acts of care, memory, and quiet resistance. In an era of ecological crisis, these practices invite us to imagine futures built on joy, kinship, and reciprocity with the land.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".