Abstract
‘A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?’ This invitation — sent by one of the authors to the others — led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID‐19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By diffractively intertwining our embodied experiences of becoming together‐with Others, we foreground a multiplicity of repair (care) practices COVID‐19 is making visible. Echoing one another, we take a stand and say that we need to prevent the future from becoming the past. We are not going back to the past; our society has already changed and there is a need to cope with innovation and repairing practices that do not reproduce the past.
Highlights
Silvia Gherardi – The story of this ‘experimental writing’ began with an e-mail that I sent to some colleagues and friends with whom I was already in contact or interested to enter into correspondence with
The invitation to write collaboratively for the section Feminist Frontiers was formulated in the following words: In the past I developed a theoretical framework for studying workplace accidents as breakdowns and to study mending practices for the repair work of the texture of practices (Gherardi, 2004)
Henke proposes a sociology of repair to analyse it as an ongoing skill used to maintain workplace order. He writes: “repair is not at the margins of order, waiting to be deployed if something goes wrong. Instead it is a practice at the centre of social order: repair work makes workplaces normal” (Henke, 2000, p. 55)
Summary
Silvia Gherardi – The story of this ‘experimental writing’ began with an e-mail that I sent to some colleagues and friends with whom I was already in contact or interested to enter into correspondence with. Covid-19 makes us prisoners of multiple temporalities: the past (and of colonialism), which is far from being repaired; the present, in which a breakdown has changed our forms of sociality; and the need to prevent the future from becoming the past.
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