Comment by Sandra Abels
On 24 April 2024, Ronja Trischler, a scholar in cultural studies with a Ph. D. in sociology who is currently working as in a post doc position at the chair of Sociology of Science and Technology at TU Dortmund, came to the RUSTlab to talk about “Replace or Repair – Moderating online advice on how to take care of broken things.”
Our speaker presented an ethnographically inspired pre-study of an online community that is occupied with questions around repair. The closed Facebook group in focus undergoes a steady and rather rapid growth and the moderation of posts started only recently. Ronja is interested in both, the ongoing discourses on repair and online practices of moderating said discourses. In her talk, she shared early observations and impressions mainly from lurking in this group that features a seemingly strong ideological stance, with ‘Gegen die Wegwerfgesellschaft’ (= ‘against the throw-away society’) being the motto of the group.
Her vivid descriptions invited us into a world of very specific forms of knowledges, and as we found out in the discussion following the presentation, a very gendered online space. It seems to be a realm of handymen who claim expertise around technical objects such as ceramic stove tops, shower installations, electronic devices, and drinking horns, but not around practices of sock-mending, stitching up holes in trousers or similar, nor – now, that I think about it – non-materialities like relationships. In this group, repair seems to be a really hands-on and male-dominated practice, as is talking about repair there. According to Ronja, there are some seemingly female users asking for advice, but in this group giving advice, discussing, and at times challenging each other’s expertise is typically a male practice.
I found this an interesting observation. Grinvald and Tur-Sinai propose that “[a]ccess to repair information is an essential aspect of an effective right to repair” and that an exercisable right to repair can be considered a feminist aim because classism and imperialism both get partly perpetuated “due to an unrealized ability to repair through higher cost and burdensome repair” (Grinvald, Tur-Sinai, 2024, 25 f.). But then, listening to Ronja’s account, this is not how I imagine the discourses in this group to unfold. To me, those negotiations seem laden with frictions. On the one hand, there is a group of (supposedly) male participants who seem to care a lot, albeit about objects and best practices rather than the people behind the profiles asking for advice. I imagine this way of caring to come with a side of competitive discursive practices about who knows best how to repair a specific object. In German, a fitting term would probably be ‚Besserwisserei‘ (as suggested by the fellow RUSTlab member who was kind enough to read my comment before publication. THX!). Envisioning their way of talking to each other, I dubbed them ‘dealers of knowledge’, persons who are exchanging pieces of advice against a broad(er) recognition of their expertise.
Such discourse reminds me of Donna Haraway’s notion of feminist objectivity through the manifold lenses of particular and situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988) and I find myself wondering about how folks in those online discussions might determine the one best way of repairing a given thing in its specific context? Do the dealers of knowledge in this Facebook group care for the situatedness of the objects and their owners as much as they care for their own claim to expertise? And if discourses in this group are more like what feels like an experts’ pissing contest re: their claim to knowledge, do they come with feminist empowerment as a by-product?
Last, but not least: Many thanks to Ronja Trischler for her intriguing talk. I hope to hear more about this research in the future.
References
Grinvald, Leah Chan/ Tur-Sinai, Ofer (2024). Defending the Right to Repair. In: Jones, Meg Leta; Amanda Levendowski (Ed.), Feminist Cyberlaw: University of California Press, pp. 25-37. Online: https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.14086449.5
Haraway, Donna (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In: Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.