Repair matters

Special Issue Call for Paper: This special issue of ephemera aims to investigate contemporary practices of repair as an emergent focus of recent organizing at the intersection of politics, ecology and economy. We wish to explore notions of repair and maintenance as crucial components for redefining socio-political imaginaries, away from the neoliberal capitalist dogma of throw-away culture and planned obsolescence

Sustainability, living labs and repair : approaches to climate change mitigation

The year 2020 started with a massive bushfire crisis in south eastern Australia, resulting in disruption to many communities, the loss of lives and businesses, an estimated loss of a billion animals and the dirtiest air on the planet in the cities of Sydney, Newcastle and Canberra. With record-high temperatures and a punishing drought lasting several years, the Australian bush was primed to explode into flames. With lightning strikes in national parks, the spontaneous eruptions of bushfire spread from the north coast to the south and inland towards the alpine regions of New South Wales and Victoria. With the very hot year of 2019 affecting other parts of the planet in 2020, the Antarctic Peninsula reached a record 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The chapter that follows reflects the new progressive politics of climate change that emerged in 2019 with large mass demonstrations taking place in Australia and around the world and examines the critical role of universities in the mitigation of climate catastrophe. The following interventions are variably focused on the concept of ‘Living Labs’ where thinking is developed within a problem-solving ethos. The three contributions here offer ways to think about sustainability with specific reference to waste recovery, environmental awareness in urban settings and the contribution that a ‘repair’ mentality can make to a shared and re-cycled economy. With a clear-eyed recommendation that mitigation of climate change starts locally, the premise of the paper is that people can work with what is available as local solutions to specific problems. The impact of this approach can be essential to people who sense the impending catastrophe and who may have experienced the crisis directly through compromises in their health outcomes, the experience of trauma and the loss of property and livelihoods, though through no fault of their own. The links through the Western Sydney University campus, common ground to the authors to both its small bushland outpost and further to the local community it serves, suggest that the boundaries of the campus are permeable—and that Living Labs are both a means and metaphor for thinking about how the campus opens learning and knowledge creation about sustainability for its students, staff and community constituents

Interventions: contesting time, expertise and perspective in conservation decision-making

Conservation decision-making is a critical com- ponent of professional practice, which responds to a variety of external sources of information and data in order to make informed judge- ments. Time, expertise and perspective form the foundation of heuristic methodologies that facilitate decision-making in participatory pro- cesses but often challenge consensus. These concepts can be understood through active reflexive practice, whereby decisions are inter- rogated and the challenges brought by time, expertise and perspective understood. Case studies spanning varying settings including the archaeological field, museum and univer- sity illustrate aspects of this process and provide insight into conservation practice and its impact on artefact interpretation

Repair Matters

Repair has visibly come to the fore in recent academic and policy debates, to the point that ‘repair studies’ is now emerging as a novel focus of research. Through the lens of repair, scholars with diverse backgrounds are coming together to rethink our relationships with the human-made matters, tools and objects that are the material mesh in which organisational life takes place as a political question. This special issue is interested to map the ways that repair can contribute to organisational models alternative to those centered around growth. In order to explore the politics of repair in the context of organization studies, the papers gathered here investigate issues such as: repair as a specific kind of care and socially reproductive labour; repair as a direct intervention into the cornerstones of capitalist economy, such as exchange versus use value, division of work and property relations; repair of infrastructures and their relation with the broader environment; and finally repair as the reflective practice of fixing the organizational systems and institutional habits in which we dwell. What emerges from the diversity of experiences surveyed in this issue is that repair manifests itself as both a regime of practice and counter-conduct that demand an active and persistent engagement of practitioners with the systemic contradictions and power struggles shaping our material world

Proceed with Care:Reimagining Home IoT Through a Care Perspective

As the internet is increasingly embedded in the everyday things in our homes, we notice a need for greater focus on the role care plays in those relationships—and therefore an opportunity to realize un- seen potential in reimagining home Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper we report on our inquiry of home dwellers’ relationships to caring for their everyday things and homes (referred to as thing- care). Findings from our design ethnography reveal four thematic qualities of their relationships to thingcare: Care Spectacle, Care Liminality, Ontological Binding, and Care Condition. Using these themes as touchstones, we co-speculated to produce four specula- tive IoT concepts to explore what care as a design ethic might look like for IoT and reflect on nascent opportunities and challenges for domestic IoT design. We conclude by considering structures of power and privilege embedded within care practices that critically open new design imaginaries for IoT

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

Repair matters - editorial

Repair has visibly come to the fore in recent academic and policy debates, to the point that ‘repair studies’ is now emerging as a novel focus of research. Through the lens of repair, scholars with diverse backgrounds are coming together to rethink our relationships with the human-made matters, tools and objects that are the material mesh in which organisational life takes place as a political question. This special issue is interested to map the ways that repair can contribute to organisational models alternative to those centered around growth. In order to explore the politics of repair in the context of organization studies, the papers gathered here investigate issues such as: repair as a specific kind of care and socially reproductive labour; repair as a direct intervention into the cornerstones of capitalist economy, such as exchange versus use value, division of work and property relations; repair of infrastructures and their relation with the broader environment; and finally repair as the reflective practice of fixing the organizational systems and institutional habits in which we dwell. What emerges from the diversity of experiences surveyed in this issue is that repair manifests itself as both a regime of practice and counter-conduct that demand an active and persistent engagement of practitioners with the systemic contradictions and power struggles shaping our material world

Designed in Shenzhen: Shanzhai Manufacturing and Maker Entrepreneurs

We draw from long-term research in Shenzhen, a manufacturing hub in the South of China, to critically examine the role of participation in the contemporary discourse around maker culture. In lowering the barriers of technological production, “making” is being envisioned as a new site of entrepreneurship, economic growth and innovation. Our research shows how the city of Shenzhen is figuring as a key site in implementing this vision. In this paper, we explore the “making of Shenzhen” as the “Silicon Valley for hardware.” We examine, in particular, how maker-entrepreneurs are drawn to processes of design and open sharing central to the manufacturing culture of Shenzhen, challenging conceptual binaries of design as a creative process versus manufacturing as its numb execution. Drawing from the legacy of participatory design and critical computing, the paper examines the social, material, and economic conditions that underlie the growing relationship between contemporary maker culture and the concomitant remake of Shenzhen.

Herausforderung soziale Teilhabe: Repair-Cafes als Orte inklusiver nachhaltiger Entwicklung?

In the past few years, debates increasingly emerge that discuss the potential of repair and DIY initiatives to contribute to inclusive and sustainable developments. It is argued that initiatives enable individuals to take responsibility for sustainable consumption. Moreover, they are said to promote citizen empowerment and collaborative practices and therefore strengthening social transformations processes towards sustainability. Currently, there is little research that looks at whether the empowerment of citizen through repair and DIY activities will be inclusive to all people and enable more sustainable consumption patterns. This paper develops first ideas, questions and categories to observe the possibilities and constraints for inclusiveness in repair cafés, enabling collaborative practise and creating seedbeds for social transformations. We draw on a social practice theory approach and normative (evaluation) perspectives for inclusiveness to empirically examine practices in repair cafés through participant observations