Short Abstract

This panel invites discussion on everyday forms of repair in challenging urban environments across the African continent. It will draw particular attention to everyday practices, figures and places that redefine what repair means from an African urban perspective.

Long Abstract

This panel invites discussion on everyday forms of repair in challenging urban environments across the African continent. While the violence, brutality, and stress experienced by the most precarious urban residents in Africa have been widely documented, we seek to explore African cities also as spaces where possibilities for repair emerge.

We understand repair as a process through which individuals, alone or collectively, seek relief from the violence of everyday urban life. This may involve overcoming a traumatic event or coping with the diffuse brutality of living conditions. Relief may take the form of empathetic listening (Kimari 2018), recognition, or mutual aid. It may also involve “technologies of the self,” including meditation, rest, withdrawal, prayer, and sporting or artistic practices (Michel 2021). We thus approach repair as encompassing a broader range of everyday actions than legal or political processes of recognition and compensation.

We particularly welcome contributions examining everyday practices—speaking and listening, bodily practices, manual work—and the ways in which they intertwine spiritual, social, artistic, and activist registers. We also invite papers on “healers”: people who care for and respond to the suffering of others (pastors, activists, health and social workers…) Finally, we seek to shed light on ordinary places, sometimes repurposed from their original uses, where distinctive forms of care for oneself and others are invented and enacted.

Kimari, W. 2018. “Activists, Care Work, and the ‘Cry of the Ghetto’ in Nairobi” Palgrave Communications, vol. 4.1

Michel, J. 2021. Le réparable et l'irréparable : L'humain au temps du vulnérable. Hermann.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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