Repair in a broken world: Repair and care

Feminist discourse has long paid attention to the intersection of care and critical theory. From the ‘hard’ writings of Hannah Arendt who nevertheless declared love to be the force holding together the body politic to the so-called ‘reparative turn’ that followed Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s 1996 intervention against cultures of suspicion to foreground a mode of reparative reading that would ‘rebuild’ the world through caring theory, care has a central if overlooked role to play in understanding how critical discourse operates. More recent contributions to this field include Bruno Latour’s suggestion to suspend the centrality of paradigms that ‘think with a hammer’ to invite compositional forms or Chantel Carr’s dialogue exploration of care as a way of living with the conditions of planetary breakdown. Holding these threads together, in this seminar we explore care as a function of repair, one that holds onto the criticality of critical theory while still allowing for the light to shine through the fissures of breakage and breakdown.

Invited speakers include:

• Dr Kim Trogal, Canterbury School of Architecture, University for the Creative Arts, UK
• Loren Adams, PhD candidate, Melbourne School of Design
• Simon Robinson, OFFICE design and research studio Melbourne