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 aiming to empower 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.
Together we will explore repair practices and politics of everyday hacking to rethink our relationships with the human-made matters, tools and objects that are the material mesh in which organizational life takes place as a political question.
Repair Matters: a round table on repair & everyday hacking
30th October 2019, 7pm- 9pm
The Restart Project
3Space (International House)
6 Canterbury Crescent,
Brixton, London, SW9 7QD
This event is kindly supported by the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University and The Restart Project.
About Repair Matters - ephemera. theory & politics in organisation, volume 19, number 2 (2019) - edited by Valeria Graziano and Kim Trogal
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
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.
About the participants:
Valeria Graziano is a Research Fellow at the Center for Postdigital Cultures of the University of Coventry. Her work focuses on organizational forms and cultural practices that foster the rejection of work, the collectivization of social reproduction and the politicization of pleasure. She is the convenor of the international project Pirate Care (pirate.care). Her recent writings include ‘Learning from #Syllabus’ (State Machines, Institute of Network Cultures, 2019); ‘Recreation at Stake’ (Live Gathering, b_books, 2019); and ‘What’s On? An Ethology of Public Programming’ (in Organizing Counterpublics, Angewandte, 2019).
Ugo Vallauri is one of the co-founders of the Restart Project, a people-powered social enterprise that aims to fix our relationship with electronics by supporting community repair events and advocating for the Right to Repair.
Marcell Mars is a research associate at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University (UK). Mars is one of the founders of (. His research ‘Ruling Class Studies’, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011), examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. He is a doctoral student at Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University, writing a thesis on Foreshadowed libraries. Together with Tomislav Medak he founded Memory of the World/Public Library, for which he develops and maintains software infrastructure.
Tomislav Medak is a doctoral student at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. Medak is a member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, as well as an amateur librarian for the Memory of the World/Public Library project. His research focuses on technologies, capitalist development, and postcapitalist transition, particularly on economies of intellectual property and unevenness of technoscience. He authored two short volumes: The hard matter of abstraction—A guidebook to domination by abstraction and Shit tech for a shitty world. Together with Marcell Mars he co-edited Public Library and Guerrilla Open Access.
Amit S. Rai is Reader in Creative Industries and Arts Organising at Queen Mary, University of London, where he has also taught critical marketing studies and business ethics. He is author of Rule of Sympathy: Race, Sentiment, Power 1760-1860 (Palgrave, 2002) and Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage (Duke UP, 2009). He has taught at the New School for Social Research, Florida State University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and Lorton Maximum Security Prison. His current research touches on critical management and organizational studies of the creative and cultural industries in the UK and India, the gendering of affective labor in social reproduction in India, media practices of commoning, and hacking and piracy ecologies in the UK and South Asia. He is a trustee board member of the Live Art Development Agency and Project Phakama, and the convener of the MA in Creative Industries and Arts Organisation at QMUL.
Kim Trogal is a Lecturer in Architecture History and Theory at the Canterbury School of Architecture, University for the Creative Arts. She is co-editor, with Doina Petrescu, of the book The Social (Re)Production of Architecture (2017), and co-editor of the book Architecture and Resilience (2018) with Irena Bauman, Ranald Lawrence and Doina Petrescu.
Julia Udall is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Sheffield Hallam University where she leads the first year of the MArch programme, and teaches history, theory and design across the school. Her current research is focused on commons, community economies, design pedagogy, activist spatial practices and mapping. She is a director of social enterprise architecture practice Studio Polpo, which initiates transdisciplinary making, design, research and writing projects that seek to support the development of more just, equitable and environmentally conscious cities.
| Period | 30 Oct 2019 |
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| Event type | Other |
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| Location | London, United KingdomShow on map |
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| Degree of Recognition | International |
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