By LILIANA GIL, 3/28/2016. As a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the New School for Social Research, I have been developing a project about idioms of improvisation and ad-hoc repair in Brazil, and the ways in which these ideas have been taken up by designers, artists, and hackers to imagine alternative engagements with technology. What kind of society would this be if all of us had repairing and recycling skills? What if objects were not determined by their known uses but by their functional possibilities? What if we didn’t have to fix anything at all? These are some of the questions my informants ask. As a social researcher, my role is to critically contextualize these propositions, but I am also drawn to them in deep curiosity.
Over the past two summers, I conducted exploratory research in Brazil. In 2015, I did participant observation in Complexo do Alemão, a favela in Rio de Janeiro. With the help of Barraco #55, I looked at stories and processes around improvised repair with a particular focus on the recombination of objects beyond their original function. In 2014, I engaged with a number of hackers and activists in the São Paulo area who have been inspired by these precarious practices to articulate their own DIY approaches. Now, I am looking forward to extending the scope of my research and to open it to other comparable experiences of technological improvisation in the so-called Global South. With the ICI Starr Summer Travel Grant, I will be visiting India for the first time. My tickets are booked. Soon I will be traveling to Mumbai, Chennai, and Bengaluru.