Repair Matters

Through the lens of repair, scholars with diverse backgrounds are coming together. 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.

With texts by: Carl Sebastian Abrahamsson, Gigi Argyropoulou & Hypatia Vourloumis, Manuel Callahan, Serena Cangiano & Zoe Romano, Lisa Conrad, Hubert Gendron-Blais, Bridget Harvey, Emanuele Leonardi, Tomislav Medak & Marcell Mars, Marta Perez & Francesco Salvini Ramas, Benedikt Schmid, Frithiof Svenson, Julia Udall, and Jereon Veldman.

The issue can be freely accessed here: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/issue/repair-matters

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Repair Matters: a round table exploring current debates on repair & everyday hacking
30th October 2019, 7pm- 9pm
The Restart Project
3Space (International House)
6 Canterbury Crescent,
Brixton, London, SW9 7QD

Repair Matters, an event launching the special issue of the journal ephemera: theory & politics in organization ‘Repair Matters’ (vol. 19, n.2, 2019), edited by Valeria Graziano & Kim Trogal together with Amit Rai’s On Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India (Duke University Press, 2019). The event is hosted by The Restart Project, a social enterprise empowering people to learn how to repair (https://therestartproject.org/). 

The presentation will take place as a conversation between Repair Matters co-editors Valeria Graziano (Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University) & Kim Trogal (University for the Creative Arts); issue contributors Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (Memory of the World/Public Library project) and Julia Udall (Sheffield Hallam University, Studio Polpo); Amit Rai (Queen Mary University), author of On Jugaad Time; and Ugo Vallauri, co-founder of the Restart Project.

About On Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India

In India, the practice of jugaad— finding workarounds or hacks to solve problems— emerged out of subaltern strategies of negotiating poverty, discrimination, and violence but is now celebrated in management literature as a disruptive innovation. In Jugaad Time Amit S. Rai explores how jugaad operates within contemporary Indian digital media cultures through the use of the mobile phone. Rai shows that despite being co-opted by capitalism to extract free creative labor from the workforce, jugaad is simultaneously a practice of everyday resistance, as workers and communities employ hacks to oppose corporate, caste, and gender power. Locating the tensions surrounding jugaad—as both premodern and postdigital, innovative and oppressive—Rai maps how jugaad can be used to undermine neoliberal capitalist media ecologies and nationalist politics.