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

Caring: making commons, making connections

This chapter aims to open up some questions around care and the production of 1 architecture and space. I consider both the spatiality of care and how care as a practice might involve working with different concepts of space. Following feminists thinkers and activists, especially Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Silvia Federici and architect Leslie Kanes Weisman, I explore how such concepts have, historically at least, structured dominant value systems that marginalise and disavow care labour. Through this discussion I want to make a case for the importance of including care within our understandings of architectural production, to highlight a critical yet often unseen relationship between space, architecture and care

More common, more public: working with products for transvaluation

‘More common, more public’ brings together two creative practice research projects to explore, firstly the themes within them that offer a critical perspective on the making of values and relational ethics more attuned to commons and collective life. Secondly, in framing the material-social practices of these art-architecture practitioners as research, we question opportunities for learning from the potential of transference of values and ways of valuing knowledge between different practice and research publics. Both projects, introduce the idea of working with products, which enable the performance and practice of new values, of collective making and sharing. In particular they suggest a different mode of production and use, other than commercial or commodified ones. The values of the products are wrapped in the stories around them, as well as their capacity in making connections, and new claims to space. Amidst the aggressive privatisation of space, and not least of knowledge and language, we are interested in how these forms of practice might translate and survive processes of enclosure, in both public space and the revaluing within cultures of standardization and evaluation in the academy

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 politics of commoning and designing

This theme aims to bring together practitioners, activists and researchers to explore the tensions and potentialities around commoning in design and the (re)production of ‘community economies’. As De Angelis (2007) and others point out, commons are today thought as the basis on which to build social justice, environmental sustainability and a good life for all. But they, just as ‘community economies’ (J.K. Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2011), operate within a world dominated by capital’s priorities and are thus also sites of struggle as well as targets of co-optation and enclosure

On domestic fantasies and anti-work politics: a feminist history of complicating automation

In this article we place the discussions of automation in post-work imaginaries within and alongside feminist critiques and understandings of domestic technology. Structured in three parts, the first surveys debates on the future of work, showing how feminist materialist critiques of technology would lend itself to an anti-work rather than post-work politics. The second focuses on both historical and contemporary feminist critiques of domestic automation to situate the post-work condition in this longer lineage. In the final section, we sketch the contours of a distinctly feminist anti-work imaginary drawing on Dolores Hayden’s work on collective domestic settlements and Rachel Maine’s work on amateur uses and repurposing of obsolete technologies in the name of a politics of pleasure

The Return of the Repair Shop: Between Consumerism and Social Reproduction

We are currently involved in a research project focusing on the emerging phenomenon of new kinds of repair ‘shops’ in various countries across Europe, aiming to compare the transversal practices and political impacts of their different organisational setups