In the seminar, the presentations and keynotes will engage in imagining what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as the starting points for research – as our keynote speaker, professor of Information Science and Science and Technology Studies, Steven J. Jackson invited us to do in the seminal paper “Rethinking Repair” (2014). This shift in perspective requires us to acknowledge the limits of our fragile world and recognize the importance of repair, maintenance, and care as a means of sustaining the good life amidst all the brokenness.
The in-person event will take place at Tampere University. The official registration period has ended but we welcome audience to the event!
Seminar programme
Thursday 12 December (Linna K104, Väinö Linna-auditorium)
12.15 Opening words
12.30 Session 1: Scales and complexities of the Broken World
- Kirsi Pauliina Kallio & the HUMANE-CLIMATE research team // Living with colonial climate mobilities: empathic unsettlement and decolonizing climate change pedagogies
- Shyam Gadhavi and Marjaana Jauhola // “More hands are more beautiful” Lifehistorical Trajectories of Small Farmer-Led Socioecological Change: Transformation Without Protests in Kachchh, Gujarat, India
- Minna Vigren, Tero Karppi & Olli Pyyhtinen // Tackling digital excess in a broken world
- Minna Ruckenstein // Repairing the Unrepairable
14.00 Coffee break
14.15 Session 2: Living and working with Brokenness
- Chloe Kiernicki // Visibility through acts of repair: rethinking ubiquity in material culture
- Riina Siren // Built Heritage in a Broken World
- Mario Kolkwitz & Mari-Sohvi Miettinen // Mending or breaking with art? Informal creative stakeholders as actors to envision new futures for buildings threatened by demolition
- Antti Kurko, Minna Vigren & Tarja Rautiainen-Keskustalo // Brokenness of the digital world: Media ecological approaches to repair, maintenance, and care
15.45 Break
16.15-17.30 Keynote by Steven Jackson: Break Fix Build: Repair and the Art of Living
17.15-17.30 Closing of the first day
Friday 13 December (Main Building D13-auditorium)
9.30 Keynote by Valeria Graziano: Institutional Tinkering: Repair as Insurgent Provisioning
10.30 Coffee break
10.45-12.15 Session 3: Rethinking Digitalization and Connectivity in the Broken World
- Rainforest Scully-Blaker // On Zugzwang: Exhaustion and Rest in Games and Digital Culture
- Marko Teräs & Hanna Teräs // Navigating the Digitalization of Higher Education in a Broken World: An Institutional Ethnography Approach
- Santtu Räisänen // Workaround as a form of invisible, non-contestational and non-transformational repair
- Marko Ala-Fossi // Profits before people? Broadband pioneer faces challenges in mobile connectivity
- Marcelo Rosa Hatugai // Are students agents for collaboration when playing Scrabble with rarity or limited resources?
12.15-13.15 Lunch (at own cost)
13.15-14.45 Session 4: Care amid Brokenness
- Mirka Muilu // Hannah Arendt’s Love as Care
- Nina Mesiranta, Malla Mattila, Outi Koskinen & Elina Närvänen // Circular consumption practices as matters of care
- Adi Kuntsman & Liu Xin // In the ruins of broken promises: digitisation, smart cities, and environmental care
- Myungjin Moon // Between militarisation and care: Masculinities and Finnish conscientious objectors in care work
14.45-15 Closing of the seminar
For questions and further information, please be in contact with Antti Kurko (antti.kurko@tuni.fi).
Best regards,
Tarja Rautiainen-Keskustalo, Minna Vigren and Antti Kurko
The open seminar is the final event of ‘Assemblages of Broken World’ seminar series, funded by the DigiSus research platform. The platform aims to create holistic and cross-disciplinary insights into digitalization and sustainability as societal transitions by bringing together experts, offering funding for research, and guiding society towards a brighter future.
Keynotes
Prof. Steven Jackson (Cornell University, US) // Break Fix Build: Repair and the Art of Living
What does it mean to fix things? And how might starting from maintenance and repair – instead of design, innovation, or invention – change how we think about technology, sustainability and the shifting state of the world today? This talk will draw on recent and older work in philosophy, the social sciences and human-computer interaction to make the case for repair as a crucial but undervalued dimension in our relations with technology and the more-than-human world. It will then turn to the problem of computing on earth: the modes of sourcing and extraction, energy and water, waste and repair that in fact constitute the earthly and material processes of computing. It concludes with reflections on the art of living, and how ongoing practices of repair, broadly conceived, may still help us towards more meaningful and sustainable relations in and with the broken worlds around us.
Steven Jackson is a Professor of Information Science and Science and Technology Studies and Vice-Provost for Academic Innovation at Cornell University. His work combines ethnographic, legal, humanistic, and interpretive traditions grounded in pragmatism, critical theory, and post-structuralism with an overall interest in how people build and maintain order, value and meaning in and with the worlds around them. He’s especially interested in places where new computing forms and practices meet the social and natural worlds, with implications for collaboration, sustainability, justice, learning and inequality. With fellow travelers in the Computing On Earth Lab and around the world, he has written extensively on problems of infrastructure, collaboration, maintenance, repair, and hope. More info and links to recent papers and projects can be found at: https://infosci.cornell.edu/content/jackson.
Cultural theorist Valeria Graziano // Institutional Tinkering: Repair as Insurgent Provisioning
Repair is never neutral. When systems are designed to break for some and profit for others, the act of repairing them takes on the forms of an insurgent practice of provisioning. This talk explores the illegalisms that emerge when repair meets systemic failures. Repair, in this sense, is less about restoring functionality and more about redistributing power. It rewrites the logic of provisioning: taking what was hoarded, breaking what was meant to control, and redistributing what was withheld. Repair becomes an improvisational craft, a counter-narrative to the myth of scarcity. It can look like cheating, looting, hacking—not because these acts are inherently rebellious, but because the rules of the system criminalize their necessity. The landlord’s refusal to maintain; the welfare state’s labyrinthine demands; the corporation’s planned obsolescence—these are not accidents but designs, shaping a world where regeneration and repair is illegalized for those who need it most. To think of repair against this backdrop is to shift its meaning from restoration to redistribution. What does it mean to repurpose the broken remnants of systems built to harm? How does repair challenge the fiction of scarcity and the legitimacy of ownership? And how might the act of repairing not just mend what’s broken, but dismantle the systems that make it so?
Valeria Graziano is a cultural theorist, educator, and organizer whose work focuses on strategies of work refusal, the politics of collective repair, and radical reimaginings of pleasure as laboratories for world-making. Influenced by Italian operaismo, materialist transfeminisms, and institutional analysis, her research explores ways to recompose infrastructures of care and social reproduction. Valeria has held long-term academic roles and taught in the UK, Germany, and Italy, while actively collaborating with artists on participatory and critical projects in the cultural sector. Her work has appeared in Theory & Event, ephemera, and Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, among others. She is lead researcher of “Figure It Out: The Art of Living Through System Failures” and co-author of the forthcoming book Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity. She currently lives in Rijeka, Croatia.
Sessions
Session 1: Scales and complexities of the Broken World
Living with colonial climate mobilities: empathic unsettlement and decolonizing climate change pedagogie
Kirsi Pauliina Kallio & the HUMANE-CLIMATE research team
Climate change is increasing various types of (im)mobilities around the world related to both slow-onset impacts and fast-onset hazards. People move increasingly between places and out of deteriorating livelihoods but are also becoming trapped in them. The so-called mobility paradigm has begun to explore climate mobilities in this broad sense, recognizing their transnational and translocal nature, people’s changing relationships with their natural and built environments, inequalities between different people and places, a variety of causes of forced displacement, back-and-forth and long-distance forms of mobility, combinations of mobility and immobility as a family or neighbourhood strategy, and chosen and forced immobilities. In critical scholarship these (im)mobilities have been framed as part of ‘climate colonialities’ that continue the coloniality of being, knowledge, and power (Sultana 2022; De la Hoz et al., 2024).
Understanding what climate (im)mobilities mean for someone, somewhere, in a particular life situation, requires empathic relations-building across difference, otherness and distance. To avoid ‘empathetic failures’ (Pedwell 2016), a pedagogy of climate mobilities needs to include the unlearning of climate colonialities, and willingness to enter ‘the unsettling condition’ (LaCapra 2014) where one’s self and lived reality are vulnerable to change. While this leap into the unknown may be frightening, Martha Nussbaum (2012) suggests that social anxieties can be overcome in ‘play space’ accessible through the arts.
The presentation introduces early findings from the HUMANE-CLIMATE research project where we are studying and developing decolonizing climate change pedagogies in the context of climate mobilities, through the methodological approach of empathic unsettlement. It draws from participatory arts-based research with 74 ten-year-old school children in Finland and Greece.
“More hands are more beautiful” Lifehistorical Trajectories of Small Farmer-Led Socioecological Change: Transformation Without Protests in Kachchh, Gujarat, India
Shyam Gadhavi and Marjaana Jauhola
In this presentation we introduce our ongoing action research with Indian small-farmers which is premised on the urgent need to respond to the global ecological, wellbeing, and agrarian crisis. This multi-dimensional crisis is experienced as loss of biodiversity, climate instability, soil erosion and land degradation, water depletion and pollution, combined with loss of farmer’s livelihoods, indebtedness, and suicides due to high-cost inputs (Shiva 2022).
We focus on lifehistorical narratives of Shyam’s extended family and the 70 years of experience in direct farmer’s markets, and shift for agroecological farming praxis in Kachchh district in Western Gujarat. Narrating Shyam’s material grandmother’s and fraternal grandfathers, and his own experience to break the extractive patterns of state-regulated wholesale markets known as APMC (Agricultural Produce & Livestock Market) yards. Such wholesale markets were initially established with the aim of elimination of farmer exploitation of intermediaries yet over the decades has been a central element in the farmers protest movements. In our analysis we identify caste, gender, and language barriers that had to be overcome.
In this paper we suggest that resistance in relation to the structural inequalities of agriculture takes multiple forms. We pay specific attention to resistance without protests, i.e. grassroots-led change that rework gender and caste-based norms of agriculture, addressing specific contextual circumstances in Gujarat which went through major agrarian reforms already in early 2000’s, and has been claimed to have performed an “Agrarian miracle” (Shah et al. 2010) – a model to follow by the rest of India in 2020s.
Tackling digital excess in a broken world
Minna Vigren, Tero Karppi & Olli Pyyhtinen
Digitalization typically amounts to a modernist progress story of constant renewal, innovation, and endless possibilities. The unprecedented scale of digital content production and storage has led to digital excess, with vast amounts of data, much of it redundant, accumulating without clear utility. Datafication is driven by beliefs that more data is better data, and companies not only produce but also hoard it. In the presentation, we examine the environmental consequences of digital excess, focusing on its contribution to the growing digital carbon footprint. Using concepts from Bataille’s theory of excess and disconnection studies, we explore how individual internet users are invited to mitigate these impacts. Our focus is on how users are informed about the problem of digital carbon footprint and its detrimental environmental impacts by climate protection organizations, governmental agencies, and businesses in online materials. While much of the digital carbon footprint originates from structural practices, users are encouraged to engage in actions like reducing unnecessary data usage, adopting energy-efficient practices, and compensating emissions through carbon offset initiatives. We argue that the concept of digital excess can provide opportunities to reflect the brokenness of the digital world and to critically question ecomodernist and solutionist perspectives which perceive digital technology as an enabler and driver of green transition and ecological sustainability.
Repairing the Unrepairable
Minna Ruckenstein
Repair is often discussed in research in optimistic terms, emphasizing craftiness, skill, and innovation. There is a certain pleasure in progress despite the ongoing need for repair. However, what if repair amplifies and scales up brokenness? This presentation will build on a study of the implementation process of a data management platform to differentiate between two forms of repair: one that is emancipatory, creating opportunities to rethink and renew infrastructural relations, and another that calls for adaptation and adjustment without resulting in tangible improvement.
The goal is to discuss the ‘darker side of repair’: how repair practices can initiate further repair needs, exposing seemingly irreparable infrastructural gaps and breakages. Repairing the unrepairable manifests as emotional responses to digital technology – anger, sadness, and anxiety – suggesting that these responses are never merely about the technologies themselves. They might also be reactions to changes in organizational structures, generational or professional relationships, or conceptions of the human, and the future of the planet. Together, they ask what is lost so that digital technologies can grow, develop, and flourish? These emotional responses, prevailing in relation to present-day technologies, prompt us to consider what is lost in the broken technological landscapes that are ‘permanently beta’ and constantly under repair.
Session 2: Living and working with Brokenness
Visibility through acts of repair: rethinking ubiquity in material culture
Chloe Kiernicki
The following abstract is for a proposed work that is a “wild card” presentation that combines literature review, practice-focused analysis, and the creation of artefacts by the author.
This work investigates the spectrum between brokenness and repair through the lens of art practice, with a particular focus on textile arts and crafts. Grounded in an extensive literature review, the work examines how repair has been conceptualized and represented, analyzing themes through case studies of artists and designers whose practices highlight the intersections of repair, materiality, and sustainability. The work not only engages with these themes theoretically but also visually, presenting artefacts created by case study artists as well as by the author over the past five years. The author’s artefacts, which began as experimental artistic explorations, have evolved into research-driven pieces that engage deeply with the seminar’s themes.
Building on insights from the literature review, additional physical artefacts are developed specifically for this seminar, guided by styles and practices discussed in the review. Central to this inquiry is the art of repair as an act that renders both the process of repair and the repaired object visible. Visible repairs transform the ubiquitous and the overlooked into sites of reflection and creativity, making their impacts felt in material culture and influencing future design approaches.
This work positions repair as a practice that embodies values of sustainability, resilience, and resource stewardship. It prolongs material use, challenges throwaway culture, and fosters a mindset attuned to care and maintenance. By integrating research and artistic practice, this project bridges theory and tangible outcomes, offering a holistic perspective on repair as a socio-technical and artistic process central to sustainable futures.
Built Heritage in a Broken World
Riina Siren
The debate on intangible dimension has taken place in the field of heritage studies for a long time (UNESCO 2003). The intangible heritage refers to diverse human expressions, substantial enough to build the identity of people. Nevertheless, built heritage is associated with buildings as material objects only. Requiring maintenance, built heritage is often seen as a remnant, constantly occupying the resources of society (YLE 30.10.2024). They have even argued in Finland that built heritage is a luxury we cannot afford (Helsingin Sanomat 22.3.2023; Finnish Heritage Agency 22.8.2024).
However, recognition of the intangible dimension could contribute to a better understanding of built heritage. Care, for instance, is tightly related to buildings and crucial in their preservation. Including repair and maintenance, building care is not only an approach but also an act of bodily practice, social interaction, and learning. Varying in time and place, building care has a subcultural character with intrinsic value, able to shape people’s identity.
In the presentation of an ongoing research, I analyse few of the recent and most prominent international heritage conventions and declarations (see references). I ask whether they can be applied to the intangible dimension of built heritage, and to what extent they recognise its positive action on people, society, and the planet. The research contributes to defining the cultural impact of building care by assessing its interconnectedness with sustainable heritage.
Mending or breaking with art? Informal creative stakeholders as actors to envision new futures for buildings threatened by demolition
Mario Kolkwitz & Mari-Sohvi Miettinen
Contrasting the growing awareness of the environmental constraints related to demolition and new construction, building replacement is a typical phenomenon in urban development. Justifications for demolition pertaining to the physical qualities and spatial arrangements of buildings often lack imagination and disregard the naturally inherent transformation capacities of buildings.
This research proposal aims to explore how creative grassroots stakeholders can envision alternative futures for buildings threatened by demolition. This work focuses on two case studies in Tampere, Finland. The first is a former hospital appropriated by a local artist. The second is a former industrial building at Pinninkatu 47, whose space was utilized for an art exhibition. While art played a central role in both cases, the former case created visibility for an almost forgotten historically significant building that led to a public debate and the main building’s heritage classification and protection. The temporal nature of the latter case on the other hand, ended abruptly with its demolition in 2023.
This work identifies similarities and differences between both case studies pertaining to the social and physical form of the creative work. It aims to investigate spatial configurations, usage of facades, and other architectural interventions. By doing so, the goal is to highlight what truly makes the visionary work of creative stakeholders an imaginative, future-oriented practice in a broken world to foster incremental urban development.
Brokenness of the digital world: media ecological approaches to repair, maintenance and care
Antti Kurko, Minna Vigren & Tarja Rautiainen-Keskustalo
We encounter brokenness all the time in our digital everyday life: unfunctioning digital devices, buggy softwares and lost network connections. On a system level brokenness occurs in growing need of energy and material resources of the media infrastructure, bad design that shortens the life of digital devices and the consumerism culture that values only the newest models of tech. All of these ecological unsustainabilities speeds up the forming of both electric and mine waste. This media ecological approach to media technology has been mainly sidelined in Finnish media research until very recent years.
Bruno Latour has written that Earth is an actor that has started to fight back – and that is why we believe that we cannot ignore the planetary impacts of our media technology anymore. We propose that we need to calibrate our media research to an offset where the focus of the research has to be set on the planet and its limit. We bring the broken world thinking to dialog with the media ecological research and observe media technologies and their everyday use from the material and ecological point of view. On our upcoming article we use three concepts that helps us to live along with the brokenness: repair, maintenance and care. This infrastructural level of approach leans to media researcher Lisa Parks note that brokenness reveals the infrastructure by making its volume and interdependence visible.
To make it more concrete, we try to find examples from the videos of YouTuber Odd tinkering, who publishes videos where he fixes old broken media devices like smartphones, video game consoles, cameras etc. We propose that this fixing can been seen as modern handcraft and also as a backset to commercial update and throw-away cultures.
Session 3: Rethinking Digitalization and Connectivity in the Broken World
On Zugzwang: Exhaustion and Rest in Games and Digital Culture
Rainforest Scully-Blaker
This research examines the relationship between games and exhaustion. I argue that
exhaustion must be understood as systemic—it is no accident that the exhaustion of bodies (both the extraction of people as a resource and the cultivation of mass fatigue to hamper dissent) maintains the dominant sociopolitical order. Emerging from work which positions games as important imperial and cultural objects, I juxtapose these virtual worlds to the rule-based systems that people navigate daily in service of asking how the exhausting status quo is maintained and how it may be undone.
I frame this process through zugzwang, a chess term that refers to a board state in which any legal move worsens a player’s overall position. In chess, coaxing someone into zugzwang is a path to victory, but here I centre the disadvantageous moves that people are forced to make every day to adapt to the demands of capital and to maintain themselves. I am interested in the toll this takes on the minds and bodies of neoliberal, capitalist subjects who are perpetually locked into picking costly moves while the world burns, instead of pausing to seek new strategies, or a new game altogether.
In summary, I present zugzwang as a lens for analyzing the cultural politics of labour, leisure, and rest in the contemporary moment. Through several case studies, I argue that while the games we play are often exhausting, there is room to imagine a more reparative and (re)generative way of being through games and play.
Navigating the Digitalization of Higher Education in a Broken World: An Institutional Ethnography Approach
Marko Teräs & Hanna Teräs
This study explores the digitalization of higher education through the lens of institutional ethnography (Smith, 2005; Smith & Griffith, 2022). By examining the everyday lived experiences of university staff, this research highlights the disjunctures between the dominantly optimistic and one-sided narratives of digital transformation, such as the advent and use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) or the efficiency proposed by implementing ever-increasing university-wide digital services, and the lived experiences of academic staff.
Through in-depth interviews with university staff and analysis of policy documents and intranet communications, or “boss texts,” this study reveals the complexities and challenges faced by educators in trying to work amidst digital transformations. The preliminary findings show various strategies the academic staff use in trying to maintain the academic environment, often on the threshold of breakdowns. One example is the use of GAI as part of studies, which is encouraged by the university but ultimately asks for a deeper discussion about what the academic discipline is about.
This research contributes to the broader discourse on repair and maintenance by illustrating how digitalization, often framed merely as progress, can also lead to breakdowns in academic practices and organizational relations. By focusing on the lived experiences of staff, this study emphasizes the need for a more nuanced understanding of digitalization that prioritizes care and support, and rebuilding the social fabric and human-human relations.
Workaround as a form of invisible, non-contestational and non-transformational repair
Santtu Räisänen
In this presentation, I theorize the workaround as a form of invisible, non-contestational and non-transformational repair which arises as a response to problematic problematizations in government innovation. Drawing on an extended case study of the implementation of a governmental AI technology to reform the Finnish welfare state, this analysis highlights the significance of invisible and largely deceptive practices of patching and fixing in upholding an artifice of innovation in the public administration.
While following the implementation of the governmental technology, certain public innovators became salient as sources of both problematizations and their technological solutions. Through my material, I trace how these problem-solutions became themselves problematic for peripheral actors, who then sought to work around them to produce something sensible within a programme which they felt to be largely senseless. Ultimately, these undocumented practices of improvised mending, while fixing problems locally, ultimately served to re-affirm the conditions necessitating them in the first place: a culture of empty innovationism in the administration.
Profits before people? Broadband pioneer faces challenges in mobile connectivity
Marko Ala-Fossi
Finland was the first country in the world to introduce broadband connections as part of the universal service obligation (USO) in 2010, i.e. requiring all households to have access to a 1 Mbps internet connection. This was possible because a comprehensive mobile network based on 3G technology had been built in Finland alongside 2G networks. It also replaced the landline telephone network in sparsely populated areas of Eastern and Northern Finland.
Now, operators have phased out their 3G networks to transfer these frequencies to 4G and 5G networks. The change has caused extensive connectivity problems in sparsely populated areas, as a properly functioning backup system has practically not been available at the same time. Intermittent connections have clearly harmed business operations in the regions, and the Wellbeing Services County of South Savonia, for example, already considers patient safety to have been compromised.
The interests of electricity and telecommunications network companies seem to have taken now precedence over citizens’ communications rights in the decision-making. Mobile networks were not shut down in order of age, as mobile technology pioneer Finland has approximately 2.8 million remotely readable electricity meters operating in the 2G network. Operators are obliged to keep 2G networks operational until 2029. The exception is Åland, where the 3G network is still in use, but 2G is closed.
Are students agents for collaboration when playing Scrabble with rarity or limited resources?
Marcelo Rosa Hatugai
The aim of this presentation is to share my doctoral research plan on how to foster students’ agency for collaborative learning. After the COVID-19 pandemic, my students were back to the classroom, but they were no longer willing to collaborate, so their agency for collaborative learning was broken. By sharing my early research plan, I hope to engage in dialogue with the audience in order to scrutinize my research questions and methodology, collecting new perspectives to enhance the impact of this research on the development of collaborative learning in a broken world.
Session 4: Care amid Brokenness
Hannah Arendt’s Love as Care
Mirka Muilu
In my presentation, I will offer an interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s idea of love of the world (amor mundi) and situate it within the context of new materialist discussions on care in science and technology studies. While Arendt’s reflections on care have received attention especially in Anthropocene-related debates, her contributions have remained largely absent from new materialist discussions. Within cultural and media studies, Arendt continues to be recognized primarily as a political theorist and a critic of totalitarianism. She was indeed both, but on a more ontological level than is often acknowledged. Arendt was not only critical of totalitarian regimes but also of all kinds of totalizing structures that constrain possibilities of plurality.
I propose that Arendt’s concept of love of the world should be understood in relation to her ontology of plurality, where it emerges as acts of care for shared reality and a commitment to secure the conditions of plurality. This concept extends beyond the realm of dialogue about matters of concerns to encompass tangible practices of caring for the common. My interpretation challenges the prevailing characterization of Arendt as a modern political theorist who drew a sharp distinction between material earth and human-made world. Instead, I highlight her vision of human beings as exceptional yet fundamentally dependent on the earth’s plurality and material conditions. My interpretation of Arendtian love as care is part of my dissertation in which I argue that her theory of the active life can be understood as a theory of material constructivism that politicizes biophysical relations of everyday perceptual and sensory practices.
Circular consumption practices as matters of care
Nina Mesiranta, Malla Mattila, Outi Koskinen & Elina Närvänen
While a circular economy (CE) paradigm shift has gained significant momentum among academics, practitioners, and policymakers, theory regarding its social aspects remains scant, especially theory based on an ethical, micro-level perspective. Circular consumption, referring to those consumption practices that aim to extend the lifetimes of objects and materials, involves ethical considerations. However, everyday circular consumption and its ethics have not gained a foothold in the CE literature. This article builds on the existing circular consumption literature by drawing insights from the posthuman feminist theorising of care, shifting the focus of care from humans to the complex relations between humans and nonhumans and conceptualising circular consumption practices as matters of care. This conceptualisation, which follows a thinking-with-theory approach, is based on empirical material constructed in two research projects focusing on frontrunner consumers in terms of circular consumption in Finland: food waste reduction and circular clothing consumption. We identify circular consumption as care by introducing three distinct perspectives: care as tinkering, care as affective practices, and care as ethico-political action. We show that approaching circular consumption practices as matters of care, while not always easy or straightforward, is an attempt to make consumption better: more attentive, inclusive, durable, and enjoyable. Our findings emphasise the interconnected nature of circular practices, the constant performativity of circular consumption, and nonhumans as crucial stakeholders in care relations. Consequently, we offer an alternative to technocentric CE perspectives and a way to promote a sustainable world through care.
In the ruins of broken promises: digitisation, smart cities, and environmental care
Adi Kuntsman & Liu Xin
This presentation explores brokenness and repair in the context of smart cities , drawing on our recently published book, Digital technologies, Smart cities and the Environment: in the ruins of broken promises. In our talk, we will present our conceptual framework of “broken promises” which we use to examine the implications of digital technologies on the environment in smart city projects, as we look closely on what breaks when cities are becoming “smart”. Using the case studies of Manchester and Helsinki, our work offers a broader perspective on the relations between technological innovation and environmental harms. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism”, we argue that it is imperative to examine not only the brokenness of environmental promises, but also the power of their affective and economic hold. We conclude with the idea of digital and material ruins, that centres our attention on slowness and repair and shift the discussion of digitisation from technological innovation to environmental care.
Between militarisation and care: Masculinities and Finnish conscientious objectors in care work
Myungjin Moon
This study seeks to answer the following research question: How do Finnish conscientious objectors (COs) negotiate and potentially transform hegemonic masculinities through their engagement in care work? It focuses on the everyday and corporeal encounters experienced by COs during their non-military service, investigating the intersection of masculinities, militarism, and care within the Finnish
context. Despite its significance as a political act challenging militarisation and hegemonic gender relations, Finnish COs have received little attention in peace and conflict studies or in critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM). Therefore, this study aims to provide empirical evidence of the potential, tensions, and implications of caring masculinities in destabilising hegemonic masculinities against the backdrop of gendered militarism in Finland.
Annually, about 2,000 individuals in Finland opt for non-military service, with half working in caring sectors such as hospitals, nursing homes, and day-care centres. These conscripts choose perceived feminine work despite the stigma of deviating from the traditional masculine military path. Methodologically, this research combines life-history interviews with ethnographic observation, informed by the Feminist Everyday Observatory Tool. Participants will be approached in cooperation with Aseistakieltäytyjäliitto (AKL, The Union of Conscientious Objectors), an organisation supporting COs’ rights. Drawing from feminist peace research, caring masculinities and CSMM, and feminist ethics of care, this study will serve as an avenue for discussion on imagining an alternative to the broken world from a gender perspective in the context of peacebuilding.