WORKSHOP 2: Reparative cultures

Workshop 2: Reparative cultures

Location: UNSW, Morven Brown (C20), L3 Room 310
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Political ecologies of repair in post-extractive contexts of the global south

Nadia Degregori (Unimelb/UNSW), Mira Kakonen (ANU), Anja Nygren (University of Helsinki), Anna Heikkinen (University of Helsinki), and Anu Lounela (University of Helsinki).

Building on Huff and Brock’s (2023) concept of ‘accumulation by restoration’, we* examine the imaginaries and practices of repair enacted by residents of post-extractive environments in four ‘global south’ locations: Peru, Mexico, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Through this analysis, we contribute to the literature on the political ecologies of repair by foregrounding the resistance practices of marginalised populations confronted with emerging technologies and strategies of repair governance deployed by state and corporate actors in order to appear aware of and willing to amend environmental harms caused in the past.
Broken Worlds Tinkering: Solar, Capitalism and the Informal Repair Economy

Paul Munro

Over the past decade, there has been a boom in the sale and use of small-scale solar products across much of the Global South, particularly in locations beyond grid electricity connections. Shaped by a range of eclectic economic dynamics including speculative investment, diaspora networks and informal trade routes, a complex geography of technology types, configurations and purchase regimes have emerged. A developing issue with these dynamics, however, has been the reliability of these off-grid solar products, with many ceasing to function within a couple of years due to poor construction and/or obsolescence design approach. In this paper, we examine the potential of an informal repair economies as a means extend and repair these burgeoning solar products.

Material engagements with waste-water reuse and landscape restoration

Matthew Kearnes

Wastewater and sewage systems constitute a critical, if largely invisible, underbelly of contemporary water infrastructures. Emerging in the nineteenth century, through the consolidation of public health, sanitation and environmental science – together with what Schneider (2011) characterises as the technologies of industrial ecosystems in recent years sewage infrastructures have years emerged as sites of renewed political concern. In this context, visions of the circular reuse of sewage sludge – commonly referred to as ‘biosolids’ – in projects of landscape repair and restoration have been troubled by a recognition of the ways in which wastewater is commonly contaminated by a range of toxic substances (including PFAS, microplastics and heavy metals). In this paper I explore the ways in which projects of repair and restoration confront the residual materialism of chemical contamination. I focus my discussion on the ways in which anticipated transitions in sewage treatment entail situated negotiations of the mass and volume of solid waste, together with the ways in which biosolids are entangled with more-than-human and chemosocial relations