Problematising making, repair and maintenance
Type: Virtual Paper
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Start / End Time: 4/7/2021 11:10 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/7/2021 12:25 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 26
Organizer(s):
Leila Dawney
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Chairs: Leila Dawney
Agenda
Role | Participant |
Presenter | Nicola Thomas |
Presenter | Steve Marotta Portland State University |
Presenter | Hung-Ying Chen Durham University |
Discussant | Leila Dawney University of Exeter |
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Presentation(s), if applicable
Nicola Thomas, Test; Post-capitalist cooperative relations in craft maker communities: a long view of the Whiteway Colonists and the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen |
Hung-Ying Chen, National ChengChi University; Densities of Repair: Altering Making and Repair in Times of Despair |
Steve Marotta, Portland State University; Old Detroit, New Detroit: ‘Makers’ and the Impasse of Place Change |
Description
Crafting, making, repair and maintenance have been recently celebrated as practices that both disrupt capitalist relations of production, distribution and consumption, and enact sustainable future worlds. Increasingly, making and repair are discussed in terms of “latent commons” (Tsing, 2015). This work celebrates practices that collectivise labour and encourage economic autonomy, positioning repair workshops, hackerspaces, craftivism collectives, makerspaces and community gardens as prefigurative spaces that enact postcapitalist futures. These are often romanticised, and may draw explicitly and implicitly on nostalgic fantasies of the atelier, the smallholding and the cottage industry, or on colonial fantasies of autochthonous creation.
Geographers have been very active in engaging with cultures of making, bringing much needed socio-spatial sensitivity to interdisciplinary debates round craft and the maker community (see for example, Carr and Gibson, 2016.; Price and Hawkins, (eds) 2018; Bond, De Silvey, and Ryan, 2013). This call opens a space to continue these conversations, recognising that geographical perspectives which have brought visibility to emergent cultures of making as politics have more to contribute around the internal politics of such spaces and practices, and from there various hierarchies and exclusions. We would like to encourage a critical dialogue, which places the lure of craft and making to one side, recognising that in this moment when craft is riding high in popular culture, it is all too easy to be swept along by the positive potential of the power of making.
In this session, we invite papers that interrogate the politics of such spaces and practices, paying attention to the knowledge, gender, racialised and other dynamics that operate within sites of post-capitalist possibility. In addition, we are interested in papers that investigate their political and future imaginaries and might consider how such spaces offer less autonomy and promise, and more consolation in the face of increasing forms of enclosure. We also welcome creative work that interrogates the politics of commoning, making and futuring.
Problematising making, repair and maintenance
Description
Virtual Paper
Session starts at 4/7/2021 11:10 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Contact the Primary Organizer
Leila Dawney - l.a.dawney@exeter.ac.uk