Lisa Nathan

For over a decade, sharing platforms such as YouTube have offered do-it-yourself repair guidance 24/7 to households across North America. Yet, in-person repair events, where people physically meet up to repair together, were growing in numbers and popularity before the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether called Fixit Clinics or Repair Cafés, people gathered to repair artefacts (e.g., digital electronics, household appliances, clothing), assisted by volunteers with skills, tools, and expertise in different kinds of repair. In January 2020, I embarked on a dissertation project to explore why people in Metro Vancouver were dedicating their time and energy to help others repair items in person, including things that could be easily replaced via online shopping. My carefully planned research activities were soon upended by ever-shifting pandemic protocols, including lockdowns that also prevented repair cafés from operating. All of this led to a period of profound uncertainty for local repair organisations and required me to reimagine my research project. However, through my interviews with 13 repair café volunteers and organisers in Metro Vancouver, the disruption of the pandemic became an opening point to learn about what motivated participants to dedicate their time to repairing others’ broken objects and to consider the work of repair more broadly. Weaving together practice theory, narrative methods, and humanistic approaches, my dissertation explores questions with and of information practice, aspiration, and story to consider the possibilities, connections, and limitations of these concepts for understanding the potentialities of “repair”. By creating space to position participants’ lived experiences in conversation with scholars’ theorizing, my project reveals ways that involvement in repair activities offers more than opportunities to fix broken material objects. The work articulates and honours the diversity and different motivations of people coming together to work on repair, and illustrates the wide-ranging forms of labour, knowledge, and skills that go into making repair events “work”. I present implications for repair practitioners and advocates, librarians and information professionals, and policy makers to engage in locally relevant ways with systemic conditions that also need “fixing”, including civic engagement, growth-based economics, community resilience, and climate crisis.

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Nation states increasingly manage peoples’ movements across borders using data analytics, automated systems, and algorithmic technologies. Once individuals begin living in a new country, governments continue to collect, analyze, and share data about their immigration and settlement process. In Canada, newcomers are often asked for data about their personal experiences and identity in order to receive access to services from community-based organizations and government agencies. Experimental uses of data can have harmful effects because of mistakes, misrepresentations, and misunderstandings which can jeopardize fundamental human rights and international responsibilities to care for migrants. Informed by previous work on the harms of datafication, this inquiry focuses on questions of care. In particular, what are current information practices and alternative visions of how newcomers’ data should be cared for ethically? The research reported here aims to learn from a diversity of groups’ ethical perspectives and experiences of stewarding immigration data as they seek to respect newcomers’ capabilities and wellbeing.Methods involved 14 semi-structured interviews with individuals in groups supporting immigration and settlement, for which conversations were hosted over 10 months during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interviewees include settlement service providers, migrant justice activists, immigration researchers, government staff, and designers of digital systems and services oriented towards newcomers. The dissertation examines participants’ stories of “data care” and recurring themes which characterize their labour. Interviewees provide accounts of conflict, confusion, compromise, and, at times, coordination with their peers in similar and different groups. Groups linked by their labour with data are therefore understood as interdependent, because their information practices influence one another and newcomers. Findings can be employed by governmental and non-governmental actors to identify links and tensions in their labour with newcomer communities’ data. Contributions offer points of discussion and decision making for organizing the stewardship of communities’ data in support of activities such as advocacy for migrant justice, immigration research, policymaking, service provision, and the design of information technologies. The inquiry conceptualizes groups supporting newcomers as part of an interconnected web, who by understanding one another’s ethical perspectives and practices may coordinate and strengthen their acts of care.

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Records held in national and institutional archives can serve as instruments of accountability and transparency for government actions (or inaction) and aid in constructing social memory. As digital technologies advance, records that were traditionally analogue are increasingly generated within networked digital platforms. In efforts contribute to archival and records theory on social media and accountability, this dissertation investigates emergent practices in the Government of Canada’s (GC) early use of social media, (2013–2014), when agencies and public servants were in the nascent stages of adoption. This study undertakes a qualitative examination of two main areas of the GC’s social media use: social media and recordkeeping practices and their implications for records generation and retention, and policy instruments and frameworks regarding the role of information management and recordkeeping in its social media use and outputs. Empirical data gathered included 28 interview participants, 34 legislative and policy instruments, online and offline observations, and 35 documentary sources, which were analyzed using a practice lens—introducing the utility of a practice lens for archival research. The main objectives of the study were to gain an understanding of the relationships between social media practices, policy, and information management and recordkeeping practices in the GC during an early phase of social media adoption and to contribute to the archival and records theory discourse surrounding shifting social media and recordkeeping practices and the implications for records as instruments of accountability.Findings suggest that emerging social media practices at that time put a strain on existing government frameworks, particularly with regard to retaining, collecting, and preserving its own records and records under its collections mandate. Despite implementing social media, findings also indicate that GC social media adoption and use operated in a bureaucratic environment that struggled to effectively adopt the ethos of these platforms (e.g. horizontal collaborations, ease of information access, etc.). The research surfaced constraints in policy development: policies intended to support increased collaboration were challenged by a hierarchical decision-making model. Moving forward, this research suggests an agile approach to policy development and an exploration of global treaty approaches in exploration of social media platform governance models.

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