Summary: Mapping technological supply chains and what gets thrown away, repurposed, consumed, and cared for within/alongside them.
Description: The circulation of electronic waste is complex. Simple narratives imagine electronic rubbish as foisted upon poor countries by wealthier ones. Yet, as repair studies scholars point out, such narratives misunderstand the contingent and interconnected nature of consumption practices. Global circulations of electronics (Lepawsky 2015) and the repair practices (Houston 2013) that undergird them illustrate the importance of community knowledge and access around computational devices. They reveal how diagnosis, repairability, and breakdown remain emergent but constrained by waste economies (Burrell 2012). People learn to fix, adapt, and maintain what they already have—upgrading software, replacing broken parts, and restoring functionality, often in ways that reflect their varied material conditions and resistances (Chin 2016, p.12). Innovative libraries host repair cafes which encourage people to maintain and repair their property rather than send it to the dump (Cottrell 2017). Rubbish and repair have ramifications for how information scholars and professionals understand their roles in ongoing processes of electronics consumption and care. As Jennifer Gabrys (2016, p.33) reminds, “Information technologies contribute to the very proliferation they attempt to manage.”
This module works to identify a process of reconciling the geopolitical realities of repair with everyday practice. Features of disassembly, reconstruction, and maintenance operate as a necessary means of engineering know-how, illuminating the forms of care ethics that become integral to innovation labor (Jackson 2014). Reflecting on contemporary information practices, we examine repair competencies as evolving forms of librarianship that take into account the wider socioeconomic conditions of erosion, error and decay.
Readings:
Burrell, Jenna. “Chapter 7: The Import of Secondhand Computers and the Dilemma of e-Waste.” In Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=3339442.
Chin, Elizabeth. My life with things: The consumer diaries. Duke University Press, 2016.
Cohn, Marisa Leavitt. “Convivial decay: Entangled lifetimes in a geriatric infrastructure.” In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, pp. 1511-1523. ACM, 2016.
Cottrell, Megan. “Libraries and the Art of Everything Maintenance.” American Libraries Magazine https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2017/09/01/libraries-everything-maintenance-repair-cafe/
Gabrys, Jennifer. “Silicon Elephants: the transformative materiality of microchips.” Digital rubbish: A natural history of electronics. University of Michigan Press, 2011. Pp 20-44.
Lepawsky, Josh. “The changing geography of global trade in electronic discards: time to rethink the e-waste problem.” The Geographical Journal 181 (2), 2015: 147-159.
Houston, Lara. “Inventive infrastructures: an exploration of mobile phone’repair’cultures in Kampala, Uganda.” PhD diss., Lancaster University, 2013.
Houston, Lara, Steven J. Jackson, Daniela K. Rosner, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Meg Young, and Laewoo Kang. “Values in repair.” In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, pp. 1403-1414. ACM, 2016.
Jackson, Steven J. “11 Rethinking Repair.” Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society (2014): 221-39.
Discussion Questions:
- How do dominant narratives about computing’s material footprint compare with first-hand accounts by people repairing machines? Any resonances, contrasts, or tensions?
- Who currently holds responsibility for acts of repair around information and computing resources? How might that responsibility change with new right-to-repair legislation or sourcing/waste regulation?
- What stands out as central to cultivating a care ethics around information and computing ecosystems?
- What can libraries do to encourage sustainable decision-making, not just in terms of information access structures, but programming and outreach, such as organizing ‘repair cafes’ (Cottrell 2017)?