28.10. REPAIR Scholarly Talk by Katja de Vries
Welcome to REPAIR Scholarly Talk! Professor Katja de Vries (Uppsala University) will give a talk entitled Matters of life and death: recycling, repairing or discarding smart electronics. Some reflections on the new Right to Repair Directive. The event takes place online October 28 at 15:00 (EET). Jenni Hakkarainen (University of Helsinki) will serve as discussant.
Use the following link to join the event: https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/61626894298?pwd=NzxCyN6RmhFjjdlafNLJMAXW3UBRpL.1
Matters of life and death: recycling, repairing or discarding smart electronics. Some reflections on the new Right to Repair Directive.
In today’s rapidly evolving socio-technical landscape, the concept of repair extends far beyond fixing broken items—it signals a deeper, politically charged practice reflecting our relationship with the material and social world. This means that repair serves not only as a functional act but a transformative approach to rethinking and reshaping societal norms and infrastructures.
In her talk, Katja de Vries uses repair as a lens to study societal and legal organization and change. The political dimensions of repair span various fields including design, energy, urban geography, legal studies, and literary theory. What stands out is how repair acts as a crucial component in sustaining public infrastructures and the broader fabric of our lived environment. The intertwining of humans, machines, and materials highlights a dynamic interaction crucial to understanding repair’s full scope.
De Vries brings to the conversation the Right to Repair Directive, a significant legislative move within the European Union that mandates manufacturers to make their products easier to repair by providing access to parts and repair manuals. The goal of this act is to involve consumers in thinking about the lifespan of products, and encourage sustainable practices by extending them.
This perspective reminds of the many implications of repair, making clear that repair encompasses beyond everyday acts of fixing and mending. Repair is about imagining and promoting alternative social scenarios. It creates spaces where varied couplings or uncouplings between human and non-human elements might be actively encouraged. This re-imagining supports the emergence of new paradigms and relationships that challenge the status quo, promoting livability, equity, and inclusivity.
By broadening our understanding of repair, we can begin to appreciate its potential as a catalyst for social change, actively participating in the creation of a livable future. Repair is a deeply rooted cultural and political practice that offers us tools to rethink our interactions and responsibilities to the material and communal worlds we inhabit. Repair, in its fullest sense, is about envisioning a world where we continuously nurture and re-create, ensuring resilience and claiming the agency in our ongoing interactions with the world. The politics of repair teaches us about reimagining our relationships with objects, systems, and each other.
Katja de Vries is an assistant professor in public law at Uppsala University funded by the Ragnar Söderberg Foundation. She is also affiliated to the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute (Stockholm) and the Center for Law, Science, Technology and Society (Brussels). Her current research focuses on the challenges that AI-generated content ('deepfakes' or 'synthetic data') poses to data protection, intellectual property and other fields of law.