Dr Laura James's writings

Another week, another interesting Zebra community event . This one was about industry level accountability, and I was particularly struck by some comments from Amelia Evans of MSI Integrity. She talked about how we should move away from the term 'stakeholder' - for several reasons. Mostly, it's been ambigious, leaving us with unhelpful ideas like "investors are always stakeholders", or that stakeholders might be acceptably involved by showing up to a committee meeting. Also, the etymology is grim - either from mining and extractive industries, or from gambling. Ouch. Anyway, Amelia proposed we should think about who is affected by the business? Lean into the complexity there, and just think about who is affected. Do they have power? Airbnb has set up a "stakeholder council" but we should note that voice does not equal power. You need decision-making power, otherwise there's a big risk that the effort ends up as tokenism.  The discussion also touched...

Kelly Pendergrast's superb essay on the home body (HT Deb Chachra, whose work runs along similar lines): In the real world of the cyborg collective and its composite parts, the horrors of the house are entirely non-metaphoric. Turn a tap in some parts of Flint, Michigan, and poisoned water still flows out, years after the city’s water crisis became a national disgrace. Plug in a power cord anywhere, and the electricity that flows your way might be fed by atrocities carried out in your name at the other end of the tubes: black lung, denuded environments, death. Unlike the privatized horrors of storybook hauntings, the spirits that animate my house exist on the same timeline, as part of the same networked system as I do (hello sanitation engineer, hello bird flying splat into the wind turbine, hello coal miner), at the other end of the tubes, feeding my housebody or failing it. ... The risk, as I see it, is that infrastructural tourism results in a remystification of infrastructure,...

 https://twitter.com/tforcworc/status/1293953002185908226   The Festival of Maintenance event on social care with The Maintainers is now up on YouTube . Festival colleague Naomi Turner writes about how hard it is to talk about maintenance : We want to show the often surprising contexts which require maintenance, who maintains, or indeed where maintainers work. These could be aspects of maintenance with which we are familiar — the losing battle against potholes, bridge repair or the guerilla gardening movement in the wake of austerity policies in the UK. It might mean re-assessing the permanence of our immediate environment (for example, thinking about concrete not as solid but as a decaying, pseudo-organic material), and instead shifting to thinking about what it means to care for it in the medium or long term. However, the more we innovate, build, create or procure in any area, the more we need to maintain. ... we’re also interested in the maintenance needed to...