Repair’s diverse transformative geographies: Lessons from a repair community in Stuttgart

While repair appears antiquated in the 'disposable era' (Packard, 2011 [1960]: 55) – implying return and retrospection – its sympathizers celebrate repair's queering of capitalist growth economies and laud it as potential harbinger of post-capitalist futures (Baier et al., 2016). Against this background, the paper explores how repair practices relate to and affect social change. It offers a perspective that addresses repair's ambiguity while exploring its diverse transformative geographies. Empirically, the paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork with repair-related organizations in Stuttgart, Germany. Conceptually, it combines diverse economies' post structural sensitivities of performativity and difference with practice theory's wariness of dualisms, in particular that of local and global. Proposing a non-hierarchical notion of scale that works through practices' spread and interwovenness the paper sets out to explore the variegated ways in which repair disrupts, shifts and (re)aligns other practices. Repair's transformative geographies are explored through the lens of five logics economies, governance, communality, narratives and experiences each foregrounding a different moment of repair's relatedness with broader practice alignments.