Fragilities: Essays on the Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics of Maintenance and Repair

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An original essay collection that explores the generative dimensions of fragility, which can help reveal new life-affirming politics and ethics. An original essay collection that explores the generative dimensions of fragility, which can help reveal new life-affirming politics and ethics. At a time when it may be easy to fall into a defeatist melancholia, if not outright pessimism, fragility offers an opportunity for a different kind of world-making. In Fragilities, Fernando Dominguez Rubio, Jer me Denis, and David Pontille argue that we need to pay attention to the moments when the bodies, things, and worlds we inhabit begin to crack and reveal their fragility; it is in these instabilities that we can gain precious access to alternative ways of being. The essays in this collection explore how the work of care, maintenance, and repair compose with, rather than struggle against, fragilities. Fragility forces us to reckon with the precariousness and contingency of life and to use this reckoning as a starting point to build and nurture life-affirming politics and ethics. The book explores fragility in four categories-bodies, environments, labor, and politics-and proposes to consider in each situation what/who is rendered visible, what/who is made absent, what is considered normal, and what is deemed strong and stable versus what is deemed fragile. The volume includes a strong line-up of leading and emerging scholars from a wide array of disciplines, including anthropology, social studies of science, disabilities studies, and sociology.

Author Bio

Jer me Denis is Professor at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation, Mines Paris-PSL. With David Pontille, he is the author of The Care of Things- Ethics and Politics of Maintenance. David Pontille is Senior Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), in the Center for the Sociology of Innovation, Mines Paris-PSL. With Jer me Denis, he is the author of The Care of Things- Ethics and Politics of Maintenance. Fernando Dominguez Rubio is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego. His most recent book is Still Life- Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum.