Connecting: Methods of Making, Unmaking, and Remaking for Speculative Futures

In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway (2016) considers a framework for how the detritus of human activity might offer routes to a future that is more integrated and balanced. She argues that we cannot start afresh, nor sweep the pasts away. She encourages that we ‘stay with the trouble’, actively stirring things up, engaging with a present formed of and from its pasts, to acknowledge and address existing damages and injustices, and from there to build speculative narratives of futures based in truths told. Sometimes this involves breaking things so that you can mend the whole. What is important here is that mending and repair are not about returning something to its origins. Repair must recognise the entanglements of production, consumption, and
waste, and the violence of these together with the violence of the rupture. As Haraway notes: ‘nothing comes without its world’ (2018, p. 137). In this sense, repair offers a site for speculative futures in which the boundaries between pasts, presents and futures are not only permeable and malleable, but also entangled and irreducible.

Here, Catherine Dormor and Susie Olczak seek to bring together a set of methodologies and ways of thinking from practice. These offer scope to think through repair
and making, to think about what it means to work contingently and impermanently, to work with community and in community with the more-than-human, and through this to offer spaces for and of reflection and inflection within community.