Making Citizens, Reassembling Devices: On Gender and the Development of Contemporary Public Sites of Repair in Northern California

Abstract

For the dozens of visitors to the 2012 East Bay Mini Maker Faire, many remarkable experiences were ripe for the taking. They could share in hands-on activities while attending a working group on outdoor mosaics, observing a robot-making demonstration, or sitting in on a make-your-own terrarium class. The activity in Studio One was no different: the energy was high and the action perplexing. Children clamored for a chance to use a Phillips-head screwdriver. Adults cut delicate wires and relayed stories of their latest electronic gadgets. A collection of mechanical odds and ends-soldering irons, spray cans, vacuum cleaner heads, and toaster shells-lay distributed across all surfaces of the room. This cluster of activity at the end of the Studio One hallway was as anarchic as all the rest: fast paced, thrilling, and difficult to digest (tdarci 2012). To the handful of people facilitating this work, the pandemonium was familiar and somewhat double-edged. It was the thirty-fifth Fixit Clinic, a public venue for facilitated repair often arranged out of libraries, museums, and community centers located east of San Francisco (see fig. 1). Meanwhile, fifty miles south, the inaugural event of the Palo Alto Repair Café, another public site of repair, was taking place at the Museum of American Heritage (see fig. 2). The two events were not planned to overlap, but, as we will see, this arrangement of concurrent yet separate programs prefigured their common practices and divergent cultural aims. Public sites of repair, such as the Fixit Clinic and the Repair Café, are community-supported events designed to help local residents fix and learn to fix

Repair Cafés as Communicative Figurations: Consumer-Critical Media Practices for Cultural Transformation

“…Regarding the gender of the organizers, mainly women arrange the events of the three case studies, but the observation in the network meeting of Repair Cafés in Germany hosted by the foundation Anstiftung & Ertomis showed that at least half of the organizers participating in this network event have been men. Regarding gender, the most significant pattern in respect of the actor constellations in the communicative figurations of Repair Cafés can be found in the group of helpers: while nearly exclusively men offer to repair media technologies, women volunteer to repair textiles; this finding goes along with the results of the study Daniela Rosner conducted in the USA (Rosner 2013).…”

Shared technology making in neoliberal ruins

“…Feminist )ritques, pra)t)es and initatves have used ha)kathons, and other events with similar formats, to promote the equality of genders, ra)es or )lasses in the part)ipaton in te)hnology making. Their )entral )on)ern is the negle)ted viewpoints, experien)es and assumed in)apabilites with regards to te)hnology making at all levels, from s)hools and universites to professional (Fox et al, 2015;Maalsen and Perng, 2017;Rosner, 2014). Therefore, a key issue for them is whether programmer or maker subje)tvites, but not new te)hnologies, )an be developed.…”

Learning to fix

“…contexts. Research by Rosner and colleagues [19,20,21] has explored connections between repair, materiality and the longevity of artifacts; between repair and gendered conceptions of technology use and identity; and the material and ideological flows attached to repair work in global development projects. Jackson and Kang [8] have argued for links between repair, creativity and collaboration in artistic production, and their connection to questions of care and responsibility in human-object relations more generally.…”