Maintenance, repair, and mending as practices of care and acts of citizenship

Since its early formulations, the concept of care has been strongly interconnected with the concept of citizenship. Feminist scholars have highlighted the gendered nature of citizenship by pointing to the multiple implications of care in terms of equality and social justice (Barnes, 2012; Knijn and Kremer, 1997; Lister, 2003; White and Tronto, 2004;). As a dynamic and polyvalent phenomenon, citizenship is relevant because it allows us to reconcile many of the classical dualisms (public/private, personal/political, centre/periphery, rational/emotional, static/dynamic, etc.) that have long prevented the production of non-essentialist forms of knowledge. More specifically, Isin’s concept of “acts of citizenship” (Isin, 2008) combines two key dimensions of citizenship: citizenship as status and polity (institutionalised, acknowledged and sanctioned rights and duties), and citizenship as something which is phenomenologically and often unpredictably performed through acts and practices. Acts of maintenance, repair, and mending represent at the same time practices of care and forms of political activism and citizenship in the making, which are particularly relevant in the current neo-liberal context or capitalocene to connect the subjective and the collective spheres, be it in the milieu of interpersonal relationships, neighbourhood regeneration, or democratic institutions (Graham and Thrift, 2007; Hall and Smith, 2015; Hendricks et al., 2020; Jackson, 2014; Prokopenko, 2021). Consistently with the feminist reflections on the ethics of care (Tronto, 2013, 2015), the metaphors of maintenance, repair, and mending simultaneously represent a critical view of and a reaction against persistent neoliberal policies and politics and hold the promise of a radical theoretical and methodological shift. What are the theoretical, methodological, and political implications of these concepts? How can they be translated into innovative care-related policies and politics? To which extent such concepts intersect the notions of citizenship, emotion, and social inclusion? Drawing on these questions, this contribution has two main objectives: 1) reviewing current debates on the concepts of care, maintenance, repair, and mending; 2) highlighting the theoretical, methodological, and political implications of maintenance, repair, and mending as metaphors for academic knowledge production and creative forms of social activism; 3) shedding light on the connections between such metaphors, citizenship, and community building.