Repairing Worlds Main Menu Repairing and maintaining used electronics A structured media gallery of used electronics repair and media. Works Cited A page of references used on this website.

Introduction to the WIRE Project.

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The WIRE project is an acronym composed of the central question the project asks: Where is repair? Ten years ago geographers Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift published a foundational paper that sought nothing less than to, "begin the resurrection of the activities of repair and maintenance in the social sciences" (Graham and Thrift, 2007: 2). Nearly a decade before Graham and Thrift's paper, two economists at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank noticed that, "[m]ost models of aggregate economic activity, like the standard neoclassical growth model, ignore the fact that equipment and structures are maintained and repaired" (McGrattan and Schmitz, 1999: 2). The intervening years saw some attention paid to maintenance and repair, but only very recently does anything like a sustained research program in the social sciences appear to be emerging. Why should this be so, we wondered? And, what might the previous delegation of maintenance and repair to the peripheries of research mean for how fundamental concepts used to interpret the economy--and, indeed, society--enact the worlds they claim to study?

In the emerging literature, found especially in the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS), the fundamental importance of maintenance and repair to the very possibility of social continuity is being recognized. There are literal and figurative lessons to be learned about how collective life might be more amiably and justly organized in a world "altered beyond return (though not necessarily beyond repair)" (Jackson, 2014: 221-222). In our own work, we examine the maintenance and repair of information and communication technologies (ICT) as questions of economic, ecological, and social importance. Following the action of these practices is our way in to both the more straightforward implications of ICT maintenance and repair (e.g., what sort of job prospects does the sector offer, for whom, where, and under what conditions?), but also its more figurative aspects as well (e.g., how does ICT stand in for both the dreams of technological futurity as well as the nightmares of social and environmental breakdown signified by electronic waste?).

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  1. Repairing Worlds | The WIRE Project Josh Lepawsky

Contents of this tag:

  1. Refrigerator Garden, Beijing
  2. Computer repair, Bangladesh.
  3. Printer repair shop, Beijing.
  4. Assorted used electronics for sale, Lima.
  5. Laptop repair in action, San Cristobal, Mexico.
  6. Repaired and refurbished typewriters, faxes, and printers for sale on the street, Lima.
  7. DIY robotics kits made with recovered electronics components for sale on the street, Lima.
  8. Recovered cables for sale on the street, Lima.
  9. Street sales on Calle Leticia, Lima.
  10. Used electronics for sale on the street, Lima.
  11. Ethernet cables for sale on the street, Lima.
  12. Used components for sale, Lima.
  13. Handphone repair and refurbishment, Beijing.
  14. Refurbishing cables on the street, Lima.
  15. Used desktops and servers for sale, Lima.
  16. ICT repair instructional materials for sale on the street, Lima.
  17. Repair technician at work, Beijing.
  18. Workbench, Bangladesh
  19. Centro Electronico Leticia, Lima.
  20. Repaired and refurbished laptops for sale, Beijing.
  21. Circuit board repair, Beijing.
  22. Plaza de lo Tecnologia, Mexico City.
  23. Selling from the street, Lima.
  24. Discarded electronics collected for materials recovery, Lima.
  25. Recovered audio equipment and phones for sale on the street, Lima.
  26. "Serenazgo" (literally, the 'serenity' police) stationed to enforce prohibitions against unlicensed street stalls, Lima.