Repair — Scholarship and Research
While the dominant discourse of our modern culture is about driving consumption, there’s a groundswell challenging the buy - break - trash - repurchase paradigm.
Extensive and substantive work about Repair and Maintenance has been underway for some time in many quarters, from academia to theology to art. The below references are the tip of the iceberg, most with extensive bibliographies reaching far into their respective fields.
The list below is decidedly incomplete and very much still in progress, but is nevertheless offered to help people new to thinking about Repair begin to find material meaningful to their lines of inquiry.
Please suggest additions!
See this website’s Worldwide Initiatives for research and resources offered by NGO’s and other projects involved in repair.
Finally: Separating resources and people in categories is antithetical to the mindset from which repair emerges.
Art, Mind, Body & Spirit over there, and Scholarship and Research over here, and Worldwide Initiatives somewhere else… It’s all of a kind.
And yet … sometimes categories makes it easier to find things.
Need to figure out a fix for this.
If You Don’t Read Anything Else…
Read This:
“Rethinking Repair”
A seminal essay by Stephen J. Jackson, published in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society, Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot, eds. MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 2014.
https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu
Elegantly written, broad and clear-eyed perspective, leans into the positive and hope, rather than snarling opposition.
“Above all, repair occupies and constitutes an aftermath, growing at the margins, breakpoints, and interstices of complex sociotechnical systems as they creak, flex, and bend their way through time. It fills in the moment of hope and fear in which bridges from old worlds to new worlds are built, and the continuity of order, value, and meaning gets woven, one tenuous thread at a time. And it does all this quietly, humbly, and all the time.”
“…worlds of maintenance and repair and the instances of breakdown that occasion them are not separate or alternative to innovation, but sites for some of its most interesting and consequential operations.”
Notable Resources:
Repair.Design — University of Technology Sydney — "Repair Design opens up informed, realistic and meaningful public discussion about repair practices, capacities and limitations in an Australian context. This research reframes repair as a design practice, and in doing so openly acknowledges design’s culpability in environmental degradation and waste. Understanding the relationship between repair and design is necessary for the development of stronger policy, for more responsible design practice and for the open sharing of material knowledge and digital information. By making connections between designers, repairers, manufacturers, consumer advocates and legal experts, we are in the process of uncovering what design needs to become in the context of repair and reuse, such that it can deliver the most meaningful change as part of a patchwork of disciplines and stakeholders."
https://repair.design/ See report on phase one research here.
The Maintainers — "The Maintainers, a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world. Our members come from a variety of backgrounds, including engineers and business leaders, academic historians and social scientists, government and non-profit agencies, artists, activists, coders, and more."
http://themaintainers.org/
Repairing Technology – Fixing Society? — Université du Luxembourg — “The REPAIR project, a three-year research project funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), investigates the history of repair and maintenance in Luxembourg in the short 20th century (c. 1920-1990). Mending and maintaining technical items are fundamental socio-cultural practices, which can tell us manifold stories about how our societies are structured, how they work and what needs to be maintained to ensure that they keep on ‘functioning’.”
https://repair.uni.lu/
Discard Studies — "Critical Discard Studies is an emerging interdisciplinary sub-field that takes waste and wasting, broadly defined, as its topic of study. We use the “discard studies” instead of “waste studies” to ensure that the categories of what is systematically left out, devalued, left behind, and externalized are left open."
https://discardstudies.com/
Places Journal — ”Places Journal is an essential and trusted resource on the future of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. We harness the power of public scholarship to promote equitable cities and resilient landscapes. In these pages you will find writers, designers, and artists who are responding to the profound challenges of our time: environmental health and social inequity, climate change, resource scarcity, human migration, rapid technological innovation, and the erosion of the public sphere.”
https://placesjournal.org/
"We are pleased to report that Places has been awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to support Repair Manual, a new series that will explore the socio-technical transformation poised to reshape design: the paradigm shift from building the world to repairing the world. In line with our editorial mission, Places will commission public scholars and independent journalists to explore how this paradigm shift will affect the built environment and create new mandates for the design disciplines. How might professions premised on growth and consumption — new buildings, new landscapes — adapt to the exigencies of ecosystem overload? To an overburdened world in which the maintenance of existing structures and landscapes will be more valuable, environmentally and socially, than the creation of new ones?”
Maker Assembly — “Maker Assembly is a one-day gathering of makers. We aim to make a home for critical discussion about maker culture: its meaning, politics, history and future." See posting recapping the September 2019 Festival of Maintenance.
https://makerassembly.org/
ADEME — Extensive library of materials related to sustainability, including repair. Most publications are in French, though a good number are in English. ADEME is a public establishment under the joint oversight of the French Ministry of the Ecological and Solidarity Transition and the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation.
https://librairie.ademe.fr
Publications:
“Repair”
An essay on design and repair by Alexandra Crosby and Jesse Adams Stein, School of Design, Faculty of Design, Architecture, and Building, University of Technology Sydney, Australia; in Environmental Humanities, 12:1 (May 2020)
https://read.dukeupress.edu
“Understanding repair and design as interlinked helps share knowledge between the environmental humanities and design studies, pushing to transform the way design is conceived, managed and practiced. As an expression of care, repair must involve an ongoing critical engagement with the terms of its own production and practice. … Of course, even hopeful repair practices cannot, alone, fix the environmental crises we are in, nor can design solve the wicked problems of climate change. Rather, repair brings design more deeply (through theory) and more slowly (through practice) into critical conversations about more-than-human ecosystems, and about design’s culpability in environmental degradation.”
Crosby and Stein are Principal CI’s for Repair.Design, a venue for an "informed, realistic and meaningful public discussion about repair practices, capacities and limitations in an Australian context." See more on Repair.Design under “Notable Resources” above. https://repair.design/
“Hail the Maintainers”
An essay by Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, Aeon, 7 April 2016
https://aeon.co
“Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance, and for most lives it is maintenance that matters more.”
An important essay, a clarion call outlining the foundations of The Maintainers.
“Maintenance and Care”
Shannon Mattern, Places Journal, November 2018
https://placesjournal.org
This essay weaves together the threads shaping current repair scholarship in the social sciences. Draws comprehensively from fundamental publications, as well as from those less well known.
“We care for things not because they produce value, but because they already have value.”
“Across the many scales and dimensions of this problem, we are never far from three enduring truths: (1) Maintainers require care; (2) caregiving requires maintenance; and (3) the distinctions between these practices are shaped by race, gender, class, and other political, economic, and cultural forces. Who gets to organize the maintenance of infrastructure, and who then executes the work? Who gets cared for at home, and who does that tending and mending? Agreements about what things deserve repair — and what “good repair” entails — are always contingent and contextual. If we wish to better support the critical work performed by the world’s maintainers, we must recognize that maintenance encompasses a world of standards, tools, practices, and wisdom. Sometimes it deploys machine learning; other times, a mop.”
“Step by Step”
Thinking through and beyond the repair manual
Shannon Mattern, Places Journal, February 2024
https://placesjournal.org
A stimulating essay examining the form, content, purpose and effect of the repair manual in its many manifestations over time. See the April 18th 2024 entry of “Reflections on Repair” for demi-synopsis / semi-review of her essay.
Mend!
A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto
Kate Sekules
227 pages, Penguin Books 2020
https://visiblemending.com/
Offering a compelling and insightful multidimensional treatment of what mending is, Mend! finds a home both on this page and on Practical and Technical Resources.
Mend! is “is a manual with a message.” Much of the book is how-to — from teaching the basic stitches, to what tools and materials a basic sewing basket (a/k/a toolkit!) should contain, to working with the many types of fibers, there is everything a novice needs to begin, and yet more to advance a competent sewer. But that practical is presented in a framework exploring the larger context — the social, economic, political, personal dimensions of mending. “How we tend our textiles is as intimate and important as what we feed ourselves … They’re just clothes, but if enough people adopted more creative ways of sourcing, tending , and mending them, we’d fix much that’s wrong with the world.”
Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough
Ethnographic Responses
Edited by Francisco Martínez and Patrick Laviolette
327 pages, Berghahn Books 2022
https://www.berghahnbooks.com
An engaging, often provocative, set of twelve essays, “snapshots”, introduction and epilogue that expands the dimensions in which repair is commonly considered, and enriches the quality of that consideration.
From the publisher: "Exploring some of the ways in which repair practices and perceptions of brokenness vary culturally, Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough argues that repair is both a process and also a consequence which is sought out—an attempt to extend the life of things as well as an answer to failures, gaps, wrongdoings, and leftovers. This volume develops an open-ended combination of empirical and theoretical questions including: What does it mean to claim that something is broken? At what point is something broken repairable? What are the social relationships that take place around repair? And how much tolerance for failure do our societies have?"
Repair Work Ethnographies:
Revisiting Breakdown, Relocating Materiality
Edited by Ignaz Strebel, Alain Bovet, and Philippe Sormani
372 pages, Palgrave Macmillan 2019
A collection of eleven scholarly essays by many of the stand-out thinkers in the field. From the publisher: “This pioneering book homes in on repair as an everyday practice. Bringing together exemplary ethnographies of repair work around the world, it examines the politics of repair, its work settings and intricate networks, in and across a wide range of situations, lay and professional. The book evidences the topical relevance of situated inquiry into breakdown, repair, and maintenance for engaging with the contemporary world more broadly. Airplanes and artworks, bicycles and buildings, cars and computers, medical devices and mobile phones, as virtually any commodity, infrastructure or technical artifact, have in common their occasional breakdown, if not inbuilt obsolescence. Hence the point and purpose of closely examining how and when they are fixed.”
Repairing Infrastructures
The Maintenance of Materiality and Power
By Christopher R. Henke and Benjamin Sims
216 pages, MIT Press 2020
https://mitpress.mit.edu
From the publisher: “Infrastructures—communication, food, transportation, energy, and information—are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them. Repair can encompass not only the kind of work we most commonly associate with the term but also any set of practices aimed at restoring a sense of normalcy or credibility to the places and institutions we inhabit in everyday life.
“From cases as diverse as the repair of building systems on a university campus, a conflict over retrofitting a bridge while protecting murals painted on it, and the global challenge posed by climate change, Henke and Sims assemble a range of examples to illustrate key conceptual points about the role of repair. They show that repair is an essential if often overlooked aspect of understanding the broader impact and politics of infrastructures. Understanding repair helps us better understand infrastructures and the scope of their influence on our lives.
”An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life.”
“Waste is not the end. For an anthropology of care, maintenance and repair”
Francisco Marínez, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2017) v. 25.3, pp 346-350
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com
A thought-provoking comment on four essays in a special edition of Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale. Martínez grounds his comment in current conceptualizations of waste as established in the context of social relations; links waste with an ethics of care; urges complementing discard studies with repair studies; and concludes with putting forward an “elegant solution” to developing the field of discard studies:
“Repair: in the form of ecologies of care, continuous maintenance and ordinary ethics, which challenge the actual economic reasoning of accelerated cycles of production–consumption – disposal and rapid financial profit. They reveal that brokenness is never final, indifferent, autonomous, impervious to change. Rather, it is an in-between condition, waiting for a new life, available for new relationships and reconstitutions (Laviolette 2006), demanding a more intimate engagement with material and wasting practices (Hawkins 2006).”
Rich in citations.
Repair - Sustainable Design Futures
Edited By Markus Berger, Kate Irvin
288 pages, Routledge 2023
www.routledge.com
This is an excellent collection of exciting and provocative essays that challenge, inform and broaden how we think about our relationship with the material world. A very profitable read.
From the publisher: “A collection of timely new scholarship, Repair: Sustainable Design Futures investigates repair as a contemporary expression of empowerment, agency, and resistance to our unmaking of the world and the environment. Repair is an act, metaphor, and foundation for opening up a dialogue about design’s role in proposing radically different social, environmental, and economic futures.”
Repair
The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World
by Elizabeth V, Spelman
165 pages, Beacon Press 2002
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com
“We live in a world constantly in need of repair…We fix things and relationships all the time, without giving much thought to what we are actually doing. Homo reparans, the repairing animal, engages in activities that are at once very ordinary and yet quite mysterious. Repair is the fist book to offer an in-depth exploration of this core aspect of human life…our ability and impulse to fix things.”
"Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance"
Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, Theory Culture Society 2007 24: 1
www.researchgate.net
Abstract: "This article seeks to demonstrate the centrality of maintenance and repair to an understanding of modern societies and, particularly, cities. Arguing that repair and maintenance activities present a kind of 'missing link' in social theory, which is usually overlooked or forgotten, the article begins by recalling Heidegger's concept of material things as being 'ready to hand'. The main elements of practices of repair and maintenance are then elaborated on so as to help establish the argument that, by focusing on failure and breakdown in technical artefacts and systems, their vital contribution can be brought to the fore. The article then moves on to suggest that prevailing cultural constructions, and imaginations, of the 'infrastructure' that sustains modern societies, actively work to push repair and maintenance activities beyond the attention of social science. To exemplify these arguments, the article explores in detail some of the repair and maintenance activities that sustain, first, the nexus between computer communications and electricity and, second, the system of automobility. The article concludes by excavating a politics of repair and maintenance in modern cities and societies."
“R3pair Volume”
continent., Issue 6.1 / 2017: 1-3, Editors: Lara Houston, Daniela K Rosner, Steven J. Jackson, Jamie Allen. Letter from the editors and nineteen papers.
continent.cc
From the editors: ”Here are questionings of the oppositional forces of newness and continuation, replacement and restoration, garbage and treasure through ethnographic writings, philosophical deliberation, artwork, film making and cross-linked online projects.”
“This collection affirms there is life beyond design.”
“Persons Repairing: reficio ergo sum”
Tom Fisher
Chapter 12 of Understanding Personalisation, New Aspects of Design and Consumption, by Iryna Kuksa, Tom Fisher, Anthony Kent, Elsevier, August 21, 2022
www.elsevier.com
Abstract: “‘Repairing things repairs people’ is the principle that underlies this chapter, which connects it to the subject of the book – repair has implications for personhood. Noting the current interest in repair in popular culture and academia, as well as the broad scope of the topic, we approach it from the perspective of individual material engagement. This leads to a discussion of the place skill has in repair practices that connects it to a post-cognitivist approach to human knowing. The chapter moves on to think about the social location of repair practices, reviewing several ethnographic studies of repair and analysing how individual skilled people and organisations can stimulate repair in the context of concern for the environmental impact of over-consumption. Via a brief excursion that takes in Heidegger’s zuhanden / vorhanden concept, to pinpoint the moment when the need to repair an item becomes clear, the chapter notes the benefits that accrue to individuals from the calming, mindful actions that repairing often involves. It finishes by briefly noting that repair aligns with the ethics of technology that Hans Jonas’s developed, based in the principle of responsible actions.
The Right to Repair
Reclaiming the Things We Own
by Aaaron Perzanowski
357 pages, Cambridge University Press 2022
https://www.cambridge.org
Excellent accounting of where we are now relative to our authority to repair our own things, combined with tools for reclaiming our right to repair.
From the publisher: “In recent decades, companies around the world have deployed an arsenal of tools - including IP law, hardware design, software restrictions, pricing strategies, and marketing messages - to prevent consumers from fixing the things they own. While this strategy has enriched companies almost beyond measure, it has taken billions of dollars out of the pockets of consumers and imposed massive environmental costs on the planet. In The Right to Repair, Aaron Perzanowski analyzes the history of repair to show how we've arrived at this moment, when a battle over repair is being waged - largely unnoticed - in courtrooms, legislatures, and administrative agencies. With deft, lucid prose, Perzanowski explains the opaque and complex legal landscape that surrounds the right to repair and shows readers how to fight back.”
“Values in Repair”
A paper by Lara Houston, Steven Jackson, Daniela K. Rosner, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Meg Young, and Laewoo Kang, ACM New York, NY 2016,
https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu
"...acts of repair may extend but also enliven the landscape of things, building forms of meaning and attachment that help thicken human relationships to technology. Generic manufactured objects may be deepened or ennobled through repair, adding affective and social valences. Within an industrial and consumption-centered economy, new forms of durability can be achieved, and things meant to be discarded can be turned into things to be cared for and saved. At the same time, repair can change its human participants, transforming 'mere users' into something slightly more, better versed and engaged with the object worlds around them... Our arguments draw on the recognition that breakdown is everyday rather than exceptional, and that the recuperative processes of repair are central to the maintenance of social and material orders across time."
“Breakdown, Obsolescence and Reuse: HCI and the Art of Repair”
An essay by Steven J. Jackson, Laewoo Kang
https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu
“Values get built into technology, but they still take work to maintain –and additional, sometimes alternative values may be introduced through ongoing acts of repurposing and reuse that humans routinely perform vis-à-vis the world of objects around them.”
“‘Broken’ things push back on human action and possibility in ways that ex-nihilo conceptions of creativity and design may miss. And activities of repurposing and repair may call out forms of long-run relationships between humans and objects that tend to disappear under the up-front design orientations of the HCI field.”
"The role of design and designer may be less about building “new”thingsin the world, and more about inflecting and remixing the human and object -10-worlds that exist, bringing oldforces into newcombinations. As workwith broken and repurposed materials makes clear, such workmay involve formsof communication with material objects and forces with idiosyncrasies, challenges, and inclinations all their own."
Repair Matters
A call for papers, ephemera, Issue editors: Valeria Graziano and Kim Trogal, expected 2019.
www.ephemerajournal.org
“If repair brings its own (heterogeneous) ethos and logic, it could also do more than simply shift the focus of specific areas of expertise, such as design. It could become a significant component of alternative processes of organizing for socially and ecologically just cycles of production and consumption.”
"Beyond breakdown: Exploring Regimes of Maintenance"
Jérôme Denis, David Pontille, continent Issue 6.1 / 2017
continentcontinent.cc
“The Work of Repair: Gesture, Emotion, and Sensual Knowledge”
An essay by Tim Dant, Sociological Research Online, 15 (3) 7
www.socresonline.org.uk
Abstract: "As the pressure on limited natural resources and energy increases so the trend of the consumer society of the twentieth century towards discarding things that stop working and replacing them will shift towards recycling and repairing things. This paper contrasts the work of production with the work of repair and argues that the later is an artisanal process in tune with the species being of humans identified by Marx. Amongst the distinctive characteristics of the work of repair are the use of a complex repertoire of gestures, a variable emotional tone and the gathering of sensual knowledge. These distinctively human characteristics are not amenable to systematisation or replication in a machine process. The argument is illustrated with reference to more than sixty years of research on mechanised production in the car industry and a recent study of the work of repairing cars in local garages. Video data here summarised with still images is used to show the complex process of the work of repair that is explored in the light of theoretical perspectives from Leroi-Gourhan, Hendrick, and Merleau-Ponty.”
“Improving Repair Viability in The Circular Economy: A Multifaceted Endeavor”
Angelina Korsunova, Annukka Vainio, Eva Heiskanen, University of Helsinki, Finland, 2021
4th PLATE 2021 Virtual Conference
From the editors: “Our study aims to understand societal structures that enable or impede repair in the context of Finnish society. Understanding the social realities of repair calls for a theory capable of accommodating both macro-level factors and micro-level processes. In our analysis, we apply structuration [sic] theory to illustrate how non-repair practices are enabled by existing societal structures, such as rules and resources, and reinforced via discursive rhetoric and practical consciousness. Based on the analysis, we propose integrative solutions to encouraging repair as a societally important activity, involving different actors across production and consumption.”
“The Work of Repair: Gesture, Emotion and Sensual Knowledge”
Tim Dant
Sociological Research Online, 15 (3) 7
From the publisher: “This paper contrasts the work of production with the work of repair and argues that the later is an artisanal process in tune with the species being of humans identified by Marx. Amongst the distinctive characteristics of the work of repair are the use of a complex repertoire of gestures, a variable emotional tone and the gathering of sensual knowledge…Video data – here summarised with still images – is used to show the complex process of the work of repair that is explored in the light of theoretical perspectives from Leroi-Gourhan, Hendrick, and Merleau-Ponty.”
“On Materiality and Meaning: Ethnographic Engagements with Reuse, Repair & Care”
Cindy Isenhour and Joshua Reno
Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2(1): 1, 1–8. 2019
Thought provoking introduction to a special issue of the Journal. An ethnographic review that both explores the life-affirming material and relational aspects of informal and often long-practiced acts of repair and reuse, and critiques the loss of social / human / relational value as repair is being adopted into a circular economy grounded in material and energy efficiency.
“Repair and reuse are about much more than economic efficiency.”
Of particular interest: 1) The discussion of an ethics of care in repair and maintenance — care in the context of relationship with other people and with objects. 2) Viewing objects as holding in them prior investments of time, skill, knowledge and culture, as well as of natural material resources and energy.
“Repair Motivation and Barriers Model: Investigating User Perspectives Related to Product Repair Towards a Circular Economy”
NazlıTerzioğluab
Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 289, 20 March 2021
From the publisher: “This paper explores user perspectives about product repair to prolong product lifespan towards the circular economy. Product longevity can be effectively achieved by repair and reuse, where no virgin materials are required. Nevertheless, the decision of whether to repair something is initiated by users. Their motivations and choices are vital to postpone product replacement.”
Additional Research
"Goodwill project finds clothing repair sustainable, but expensive"
Pilot program organized by the California Product Stewardship Council funded by San Francisco Environment. Workers set aside high-end items donated to Goodwill Industries in San Francisco to be repaired. Stained items were cleaned by local, co-friendly Savvy Green Cleaners, while workers with Potrero’s Designing a Difference Sewing House and fashion students at San Francisco State University repaired and sometimes refashioned damaged clothing. Goodwill then sold the items through its online store. Although the project successfully kept more than 700 garments out of landfills, supported local businesses and inspired students and designers, the costs involved in cleaning and mending garments would be a significant barrier to continuing the work. Reported by Beth Winegarner in Mission Local, June 2023. CPSC Webinar reporting results: Video.
Video
Maintain was a non-profit, volunteer-run community of people interested in maintaining different parts of our world, recognizing the often hidden work done in repair, custodianship, stewardship, tending and caring for the things that matter. In 2018, 2019 and 2022 they ran The Festival of Maintenance, bringing together hundreds of makers and maintainers from a huge range of industries and disciplines. The initiative has ended but videos of Festival presentations are still available on their You Tube channel.