Dimensions of repair work

Abstract

Reflecting on the necessary, though risky path of overcoming dualistic thinking about repair and care work, I develop analytical distinctions between different kinds of repair work, reflecting gendered, racial, and spatial divisions of labour, as well as distinct forms of ecological consciousness and agency.

Repairing social connections: Dismantling carbon infrastructures with care

“…Importantly, this cannot be one waya site for 'educating' the industrial working class. Rather, as I argued in the original article, industrial workers bring their own agency: haptic repair skills and dispositions (Corwin, 2023;Stein, 2023) but also long histories of negotiating and resisting industrial capital, as the history of working-class environmental action testifies (Barca, 2023). Corwin (2023) commentary further enriches this line of thinking, speaking directly to how we might value different kinds of skills while also working to unpick the harmful systems and structures these skills have often served.…”

“…Such principles hold across many paradigms: they underpin labour solidarity, have the capacity to transcend economic systems, and are fundamental to practices of repair and care. Barca (2023) proposes a multi-dimensional analytical approach to repair, drawing clear distinctions between the repair of infrastructures and material objects, the repair of life-sustaining systems, and a third, hybrid dimension which she terms repairing the commons. These distinctions are useful in thinking through the work of climate change and the challenges of decarbonisation.…”

“…Importantly, this cannot be one way – a site for ‘educating’ the industrial working class. Rather, as I argued in the original article, industrial workers bring their own agency: haptic repair skills and dispositions (Corwin, 2023; Stein, 2023) but also long histories of negotiating and resisting industrial capital, as the history of working-class environmental action testifies (Barca, 2023).…”

“…My contribution was shaped by a long-term empirical focus on workers in energy-intensive sectors and regions – perhaps not the obvious place to start when thinking about care and repair. However, there is a pressing need to connect the experiences of all workers with the challenges of climate change (Denham and Rickards, 2022), not least because such challenges will require an unprecedented range of skills to repair and maintain social connections (Barca, 2023; Smith, 2023), while simultaneously building new energy futures and dismantling outdated carbon infrastructures.…”

To See and be Seen—Perceived Ethics and Acceptability of Pervasive Augmented Reality

“…We call this 'repair work' and we see it as an attempt to mend or cope with an uncertain or socially uncomfortable situation. The term is not new -it has been used in similar ways in human geography to address divisions of labour along class, gender etc., [62], in sociology to describe the mechanics of the workplace [63] and in HCI for example, in the context of conversational agents [64]. Similarly to those works, we posit that overcoming asymmetrical experiences requires repair work between users and nonusers that involves fragile negotiations between actual or imagined aspects of the design and ongoing adjustments of the actors involved.…”