Fast Fashion and Globalization: Exploring the Hidden Lives of our Blue Jeans. Join the Pulitzer Center on August 18, 2022, at 12:00pm EDT for a webinar featuring grantee Ryan Lenora Brown on the impacts of globalization and fast fashion. As Western consumers buy more and more clothing—about five times as much as we bought in 1980—African countries have become both the source of garments like our blue jeans and their ultimate resting place. Brown’s project, The Hidden Lives of our Blue Jeans, looks at the effects of fast fashion on one tiny African country, Lesotho, in an attempt to show how the West’s hunger for the latest trends is affecting the lives of people on the other side of the world. Brown is a freelance reporter and an Africa correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. Her reporting interests skew long, narrative, and offbeat, with a particular interest in women, migrants, and cities. She has reported from nearly two dozen countries on the continent, and, in addition to the Monitor, she has been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Runner's World, Newsweek, The Atlantic's CityLab, ForeignPolicy.com, The Daily Beast, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Al Jazeera, U.S. News & World Report, and The Guardian, among others.