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  • © 2019

Repair Work Ethnographies

Revisiting Breakdown, Relocating Materiality

Palgrave Macmillan
  • Provides a unique collection of ethnographies offering empirical insight into the locally unfolding work of repair, in and across multiple situations of technology use and material practice

  • Addresses repair work as a multifaceted phenomenon unfolding sequentially before, during and after failure, wear, deterioration, weakening etc. for a qualified and diversified readership in anthropology, sociology, and STS scholarship

  • Makes a critical contribution to relocating materiality, recasting the recent, largely conceptual debates in anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies (STS) around notions of “materiality”, “socio-materiality”, or “non-human agency” in terms of the situated intelligibility of unfolding courses of repair work

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxi
  2. Introduction: When Things Break Down

    • Philippe Sormani, Alain Bovet, Ignaz Strebel
    Pages 1-27
  3. Politics

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 253-253
  4. Afterword

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 335-335
    2. Repair as Transition: Time, Materiality, and Hope

      • Steven J. Jackson
      Pages 337-347
  5. Back Matter

    Pages 349-351

About this book

This pioneering book homes in on repair as an everyday practice. Bringing together exemplary ethnographies of repair work around the world, it examines the politics of repair, its work settings and intricate networks, in and across a wide range of situations, lay and professional. The book evidences the topical relevance of situated inquiry into breakdown, repair, and maintenance for engaging with the contemporary world more broadly. Airplanes and artworks, bicycles and buildings, cars and computers, medical devices and mobile phones, as virtually any commodity, infrastructure or technical artifact, have in common their occasional breakdown, if not inbuilt obsolescence. Hence the point and purpose of closely examining how and when they are fixed.

Reviews

“The book’s excellent organization, form an ongoing conversation as they make the familiar strange by collectively approaching order from the standpoint of breakdown and repair. Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates and above.” (A. Shiva, Choice, Vol. 56 (12), August, 2019) “A vast hidden world of continuous repair and improvisation sustains the technologies and circuits of everyday urban life, a world that has been barely touched by social studies of technology. Indeed, good part of contemporary economies is made up of jobs to do with repairing infrastructures, technologies and systems. How refreshing, then, to have a cutting-edge and interdisciplinary collection which delves into this overlooked world.” (Stephen Graham, Professor of Cities and Society, Newcastle University, UK)

“The book offers a fascinating exploration of a diversity of material disruptions within everyday routines. The way disruptions are identified, made intelligible, and handled in order to be repaired (or not), highlights the in vivo engagement of social actors with material objects. This collection of ethnographies of repair beautifully reveals how objectual practices are at the core of the socio-material order.” (Lorenza Mondada, Professor of General Linguistics and French Linguistics, University of Basel, Switzerland)

Editors and Affiliations

  • Institute of Geography and Sustainability, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Ignaz Strebel, Alain Bovet

  • HEG—Haute école de gestion Arc, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Alain Bovet

  • STS Lab, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Philippe Sormani

  • CEMS-IMM, EHESS, Paris, France

    Philippe Sormani

About the editors

Ignaz Strebel is an urban geographer and senior scientist at the University of Lausanne. His research is on the social and material practices that make up and transform urban systems. Using ethnography and audio-visual projects, he currently researches building care work, energy infrastructure services and the transformation capacities of prefabricated buildings. 


Alain Bovet is a professor at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HEG-Arc, HES-SO) and a senior scientist at the University of Lausanne. Interested in various communication processes, from everyday interaction to public controversies, he is currently engaged in a video analysis of the work of caretakers and technicians in urban housing.


Philippe Sormani is a sociologist working at the intersection of ethnography, ethnomethodology, and science and technology studies, focusing on material disruption and its heuristic implications. Currently, he is affiliated at the Institut Marcel Mauss, EHESS, in Paris and board member of the STS lab at the University of Lausanne.



Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Repair Work Ethnographies

  • Book Subtitle: Revisiting Breakdown, Relocating Materiality

  • Editors: Ignaz Strebel, Alain Bovet, Philippe Sormani

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2110-8

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore

  • eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-13-2109-2Published: 31 January 2019

  • eBook ISBN: 978-981-13-2110-8Published: 14 December 2018

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XXI, 351

  • Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations, 37 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: Social Anthropology, Human Geography, Sociology, general

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access