Dispatchwork by Jan Vormann
Repair Initiative 2026-2029
"Repair" is often imagined as an act of fixing broken objects, but its reach is much broader. Material things, infrastructures, relationships, ecosystems, bodies of knowledge, communities, and institutions all require care, ongoing maintenance, and, at times, intervention. In an era marked by extraction, disposability, and structural harm, repair offers a counter-practice: one that recognizes what already exists, what has been damaged, what must be mended, and who must be held to account. Repair can mean making amends, restoring trust, revitalizing environments, or sustaining cultural memory. It can also take the form of transgressive action when formal systems fail to respond.
The Repair Initiative explores the many ways individuals and collectives confront breakage and neglect: through restorative justice and historical reparations; right-to-repair movements; community archiving and the preservation of languages and culture; acts of care, stewardship, and maintenance; participatory or DIY interventions in public space; and the creation of tools and techniques to preserve, authenticate, or access knowledge. Repair is not nostalgia for an earlier condition; it is a practice of accountability, critical imagination, and regeneration in the present for the future.
The Repair Initiative explores the many ways individuals and collectives confront breakage and neglect: through restorative justice and historical reparations; right-to-repair movements; community archiving and the preservation of languages and culture; acts of care, stewardship, and maintenance; participatory or DIY interventions in public space; and the creation of tools and techniques to preserve, authenticate, or access knowledge. Repair is not nostalgia for an earlier condition; it is a practice of accountability, critical imagination, and regeneration in the present for the future.
Call for Proposals
What kinds of proposals are we seeking?
We invite proposals that engage with one or more of the following orientations:
- Repair as justice: restorative or transformative justice practices; historical or contemporary reparations; documenting and addressing institutional harm; community accountability infrastructures; evidentiary practices, archives, and the repair of truth.
- Repair as maintenance and stewardship: mending as cultural practice; the politics of care and upkeep; sustaining languages, cultural memory, and local histories; preserving or authenticating knowledge; participatory or community-driven documentation.
- Repair as intervention: right-to-repair work; activist or guerrilla public service; tactical urbanism; DIY infrastructures; unauthorized but socially beneficial repair practices; open access and shadow libraries; counter-forensics and sousveillance.
- Repair as regeneration: ecological restoration, environmental monitoring, and the re-establishment of healthy relationships between humans and ecosystems; mutual aid practices; community rebuilding and healing.
- Repair as critique of innovation-centrism: confronting cultures of disposability; examining the pressures toward novelty; foregrounding maintenance, slowness, and continuity as creative and intellectual labor.
Projects may be scholarly, artistic, archival, pedagogical, or community-engaged. All should illuminate the cultural, social, ethical, or political dimensions of repair, broadly defined.
What makes a compelling proposal?
The strongest proposals will demonstrate one or more of the following:
- Engagement with local communities or institutions (e.g., libraries, archives, neighborhood groups, justice organizations, cultural or ecological initiatives).
- A plan for sharing work with publics beyond CMU, through exhibitions, events, open resources, workshops, publications, performances, or other accessible forms.
- Attention to what already exists: repairing, restoring, or extending existing systems, knowledge, or infrastructures: a counterpoint to “innovation”.
- A commitment to care, stewardship, and sustained engagement, not just one-time interventions.
- Critical reflection on how repair relates to harm, accountability, power, inequity, and the conditions that made repair necessary.
Deadline: 11:59pm Sunday, March 29, 2026
Questions? Email: warons@andrew.cmu.edu
