Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Repair work and maintenance: Techniques, materiality and sociality of urban marketplace infrastructures

Samprati Pani

The project is part of the research focus area ‘Economy and Knowledge’ of the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF). It looks at repair and maintenance in Delhi’s markets across three registers: First, at the level of individuals and households, it uses repair as a critical lens to extend the conceptualization of consumption from an act of using up objects to one of making things last. Second, as a practice, it looks at the activities, labour, skills, affective and bodily investments, and subjectivities involved in repair and maintenance. Finally, it extends the understanding of repair from ‘fixing the broken’ to practices of improvising objects of everyday use, including spaces such as streets and marketplaces.Arguing that repair and maintenance cannot be simply located at particular moments in economic cycles but rather are entangled with everyday life, the project is aimed at understanding how repair shapes the social infrastructure of the city.