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

Alternative care and health histories: some case studies to help us imagine the future

The movement for Digital Social Innovation (DSI) insists on the need for a long memory to not take anything unexpected as “innovative” just because there is no awareness of what has happened before or elsewhere. In this article we want to briefly collect three case studies from the recent past that have seen social justice movements autonomously organizing their own medical care and assistance systems

What’s On? An Ethology of Public Programming

Over the past 20 years, economic criteria and considerations have gained increasing significance in the exhibition world, affecting organizational forms, production conditions, and decision-making processes. Today more than ever, economic concerns determine how institutions act, what they collect and show, how they present themselves, and how we imagine them. In reaction to this, a critical discourse developed in the 1990s that analysed power relationships and logics of value determination. In the meantime, widespread interest has arisen in the practical question of how the criticism of economic dominance of public institutions could have concrete, practical consequences within those institutions: How could museums and exhibiting organizations be organized differently? And how do we want to work? The publication Gegenöffentlichkeit organisieren. Kritisches Management im Kuratieren gathers contributions anchored in both theory and practice, which reflect on organizational structures and working conditions, formulate other suggestions, and refuse to settle for a state of affairs where critical thought is combined with uncritical action.Authors: Matthias Beitl, Dieter Bogner, Martin Fritz, Valeria Graziano, Henna Harri, Stefano Harney, Beatrice Jaschke, Laurence Rassel, Barbara Steiner, Nora Sternfeld, Wolfgang Tobisch, Lorena ViciniWith an artistic contribution by Isa Rosenberger

Recreation At Stake

Extending Audre Lorde’s intuition around the polysemy of the term recreation, I put forward this concept as an organizational principle. Via the framework of recreation, I want to think about some of the main political stakes of the forms used by collectivities able to act politically in the present. I transpose the double binding that Lorde ascribed to recreation, with its connotations of play, reciprocity, repetition and regeneration, from the realm of intimate, one-to-one relationships – with one’s lover, with the blank page – to bear consequence upon the organization of collective endeavours, in order to transgress some received ideas around the organization of cultural production, the locus of creativity and the politics of use of collective pleasures. The importance of recreation shall become clearer as I move from this notion to what I named, with an admittedly less poetic, yet hopefully effective, play of words: the recreative industries. By this term, I wish to call attention to a type of organization that has existed in various forms throughout modernity, dedicated to regenerating living labour and sustaining free time of the oppressed and the exploited against capitalist temporal structuring and valuation – and in opposition to the limitation of an experience of public pleasure as solely organized around work or consumption. The recreative hypothesis is moreover a political framework for reclaiming the organization of those semiotic, affective or relational productions that, under capital, stand severed from the other kinds. A number of examples give flesh to my argument, including historical references to the junk playgrounds in Danmnark and the UK; the international and in ternationalist phenomenon of people’s houses; and the more recent occupations of abandoned cultural facilities in Italy in the aftermath of the 2008’s financial crisis

Figures of unwork and ethics of care. Between knowing how to live and knowing how to write

The depth and significance of the shifts associated with the post-work society has pro-voked a newfound interest in the role of imagination in political thinking, made explicit by many authors who turned to the literary genre of utopian and sci-fi writing to sketch possible scenarios of the near future. This paper turns to another mode of constructing political narratives, a complementary mode often adopted in feminist storytelling: that of figuration. This article reclaims three specific figures of trans-individuation (or collec-tive becoming) to demonstrate how it might be possible to build a public sphere of un-work: Bazlen, a write who never wrote but took care of other writers; the collective fig-ure of Afro-American ‘othermothers’, as narrated by Patricia Hills Collins and bell hooks; and Amy, the little girl articulated by Carol Gilligan to give flesh to her 'ethics of care' proposition. Departing from these specific figures rather than from vast, panoramic views of a society-to-come, the article wishes to shed light on the problem of re-imagining the labours (and pleasures) of social reproduction and creative action away from their subsumption into the work regime. It will show how processes of subjectiva-tion sedimented in the collective imaginary as figures of public intellectuals impact the shape and sustenance of various modes of being together, understanding the production of thought and naming social cooperation. As the article shall describe, the relationship between living labour and knowledge (including the one embedded in technologies) is a nexus that can escape the violence of work only by locating the possibility of political action as a plural capacity located in a materialist and feminist public sphere

Speculating on Student Debt

Far from being a right, British higher education in the age of top-up fees is a commodity with a hefty price tag attached. For most students, it offers a basic schooling in debt and recasts learning as a down-payment on a dubious future

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

The Medicalisation of Politics or the Politicisation of Medicine: The Case of Italian Struggles to Design Public Healthcare Institutions

The article follows the contours of a conversation with Fulvio Aurora, Paolo Fierro and Edoardo Turri, three members of the Italian health activist organization Medicina Democratica, which will also function as the backbone of our account of the initial radical impetus and the later demise of the Italian public health system, the Servizio Sanitario Nazionale or SSN. Through the focus on the Italian context, we wish to address a set of broader and interrelated questions around the design of public healthcare services and the scale of political agency which can be significant today across a number of struggles. When reasoning around issues of health, and seeking for definitions that complexify this concept beyond a mere ensemble of optimal bodily functionality, the Italian context offers an effective standpoint. Not only because it was the first place where the pandemic spread beyond its original outbreak in the Chinese province of Wuhan, but also because in the Seventies this country has been a very important laboratory of political practices that contributed significantly to shape international debates and political imaginaries around healthcare practices. For example, one might recall the importance of Franco Basaglia's work for the so-called “anti-psychiatry” revolution; the invention of the consultori (a network of self-managed reproductive healthcare centres), operated by the feminist movement, which later become part of the national healthcare system; and finally, the method of the workers’ self-inquiry introduced by activists such as Ivar Oddone and Giulio Maccacaro to launch important investigations into the toxicity of industrial plants, which were influential beyond the Italian borders