Open Collections

Kaczmarek, Michelle Ania

University of British Columbia

For over a decade, sharing platforms such as YouTube have offered do-it-yourself repair guidance 24/7 to households across North America. Yet, in-person repair events, where people physically meet up to repair together, were growing in numbers and popularity before the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether called Fixit Clinics or Repair Cafés, people gathered to repair artefacts (e.g., digital electronics, household appliances, clothing), assisted by volunteers with skills, tools, and expertise in different kinds of repair. In January 2020, I embarked on a dissertation project to explore why people in Metro Vancouver were dedicating their time and energy to help others repair items in person, including things that could be easily replaced via online shopping. My carefully planned research activities were soon upended by ever-shifting pandemic protocols, including lockdowns that also prevented repair cafés from operating. All of this led to a period of profound uncertainty for local repair organisations and required me to reimagine my research project. However, through my interviews with 13 repair café volunteers and organisers in Metro Vancouver, the disruption of the pandemic became an opening point to learn about what motivated participants to dedicate their time to repairing others’ broken objects and to consider the work of repair more broadly. Weaving together practice theory, narrative methods, and humanistic approaches, my dissertation explores questions with and of information practice, aspiration, and story to consider the possibilities, connections, and limitations of these concepts for understanding the potentialities of “repair”. By creating space to position participants’ lived experiences in conversation with scholars’ theorizing, my project reveals ways that involvement in repair activities offers more than opportunities to fix broken material objects. The work articulates and honours the diversity and different motivations of people coming together to work on repair, and illustrates the wide-ranging forms of labour, knowledge, and skills that go into making repair events “work”. I present implications for repair practitioners and advocates, librarians and information professionals, and policy makers to engage in locally relevant ways with systemic conditions that also need “fixing”, including civic engagement, growth-based economics, community resilience, and climate crisis.

Text

2024-01-04

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87079

Library, Archival and Information Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/