Conference in Lund

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in an intimate circle of intellectuals from across the globe assembled by scholars Tatiana Thieme, Melissa García and Hannah Hillbrandt at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies in Sweden (LUCSUS). Together we discussed the intersections and inventions that take place across works of repair, climate change and informal living conditions in different geographies that the participants represented. We raised important questions including, but not limited to how uncertainties mould conditions of repair, what are the limits of resource and capacity, how do we imagine the social function of property, the dialectics between repair and resistance, how capital seems to capture 'repair', and many other thought-clusters. Through the exchange, we tried also, to build a history of the repair discourse as much ask asking how it has moved almost suddenly from "informality" to "repair" where the situation still remains the same in neo-liberal economies. The cohort put together the concepts that emerged across the cross-quadrants of space, scale, experience and techne and looked at the parabolic axis through which they begin to interact, resist, play and dance with each other, that are open to take new forms in the future.