Repair

The world is in a constant state of repair. This insight offers a particular view of Western modernity, with its history of violence and exploitation, its emphasis on innovation and progress, its economic system based on consumption and overuse, and its extractive relationship with the natural environment.

Engaging with activist and artistic practice, and drawing on writings from literary and cultural studies, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies, our seminar will survey a shift we can observe towards a different paradigm of thinking and practice focused on repair. At its most basic level, this shift must be distinguished from what David Harvey has called capitalism's endless 'spatial fixes', which displace the internal contradictions of capitalist modernity to ever new locations through (colonial) geographical or innovative technological expansion. In their place, the paradigm of repair attends to the potentially regenerative transformations inherent in processes of re-relating and re-purposing, of care and maintenance.