Negotiating Repair: The Infrastructural Contexts of Practice and Power

Abstract

Drawing upon a range of ethnographic case studies, Christopher R. Henke locates repair at the heart of infrastructures local and global, a practice for maintaining social and material orders in modernity. Treating these settings as “negotiated orders,” Henke emphasizes the ongoing work of repair through two key modes: (1) relational repair, a more localized set of practices that maintain infrastructures and the set of material and discursive interactions that actors have with these systems in everyday life, and (2) the repair of power and the systems of expertise typically supported by (and in turn, supporting) state and commercial interests. Henke concludes with a methodological coda about the value of ethnographic approaches for studying and understanding repair.