Paper short abstract:

This paper uses ethnographic field research with smartphone repairers in Dar es Salaam to explore the ways that repair can mediate value as a restorative practice, express value as a practice of care, and provide perspectives to the ethical values that inform the designs of objects like smartphones.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about how practices of repair relate to processes of de/revalorization as they pertain to a particularly salient object: the smartphone.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with independent smartphone repairers working in the busy market streets of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the paper explores the ways in which value(s) are mediated by interventions of repair, accounting for the social actors who undertake this repair/value mediation, as well as the skilled labor and technical competence that it entails.

It understands repair as a practice whose own value exceeds simply restoring (that of other) things, or delaying their delegation to the dump, but also a way of relating to and caring for the things and people that populate our worlds—an expression of valorization, as well as a process by which things may be revalorized. Just as neglect (lack of repair) can be understood as an expression of not caring (valuing), attempting to repair an object (restoring its use-value) can be an expression of care and value.

Furthermore, the paper suggests that knowing objects through their repair or maintenance (and their repairers and maintainers) offers valuable perspectives into the values that inform the objects’ designs. Smartphones have in the 20-odd years since their inception become one of the planet’s most popular and populous consumer objects. When repairers encounter these objects, they also encounter designs that are shaped by values related for instance to consumption, modernity, waste and sustainability—smartphones' intended lifespan (and afterlife as waste), or the ease of its repair or maintenance.