Thesis
It's not worth fixin': the enactment of capacity and deservingness in a Kensington repair shop
Master of Science (M.S.), Drexel University
Dec 2015
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/etd-6707
Abstract
By imposing a purportedly egalitarian meritocratic ideal, institutions of disciplinary power, including regulatory agencies, systems of wage labor management, and educational opportunity structures, naturalize the gross social inequities evident in the capitalistic social formations of the United States. This thesis draws upon theoretical framings from labor history, disability studies, queer theory, and science and technology studies to explore, interrogate, and destabilize the notions of hierarchy and merit that underlie the practices of such institutions. It develops the notion of "deservingness" from poverty studies to reveal how the measurement and delineation of identity categories like productive capacity and its constituent parts, intellectual capacity and physical ability, serve to legitimize an unequal distribution of power and resources, in part by obfuscating the conflation of these categories with the more familiar identity categories of race, gender, sexuality, and disability. Using an "ontological toolkit," this thesis proceeds to follow various enactments of the consumer appliance-and, along with it, the "productive worker"-in a small, independently owned appliance repair shop and across the practices of the institutions of disciplinary power with which its employees interface. Through an ethnographic and ontological analysis of repair in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington, this thesis reveals that, rather than being inevitable or "units continuous in time," all the categories that we use to organize our world, whether they refer to identities or objects, are both constituted by and constitutive of a complex set of social relations and ideological priorities.
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Details
- Title
- It's not worth fixin'
- Creators
- Justin Nathaniel Charles Carone - DU
- Contributors
- Amy Elisabeth Slaton (Advisor) - Drexel University (1970-)
- Awarding Institution
- Drexel University
- Degree Awarded
- Master of Science (M.S.)
- Publisher
- Drexel University; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Number of pages
- v, 71 pages
- Resource Type
- Thesis
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- College of Arts and Sciences; Drexel University; Center for Science, Technology, and Society
- Other Identifier
- 6707; 991014632526204721