Welcome to our Maintenance Research Fellows Summer 2021!

We are thrilled to announce our cohort of Maintenance Summer Research Fellows for 2021! Over the course of the next two months, our Summer fellows will conduct research in their chosen maintenance sphere of interest. Their research will contribute to deepen and broaden our understanding of maintenance and repair across a variety of fields and will address several important topics including 1) how race, ethnicity, and gender relates to maintenance 2) the connections between maintenance and environment, and 3) how business practices can contribute to humanistic and political goals of achieving a more caring and well-maintained world.

The aim of the fellowship is to bring together researchers and maintainers from a variety of places and backgrounds – community work, advocacy, city planning, art, and more – and to showcase their work. Our fellows will enrich our knowledge of maintenance across disciplines and professions. Their unique interests will shed light on specific maintenance practices across the world. 

Please join us in welcoming:

• Himadri Das and Purna Sarkar – Repair Cafe Bengaluru

Himadri is an urbanist, academician and researcher based in Bangalore. His expertise is in Safe access and Urban design. Himadri was previously consulting with WRI India, where he was leading the sustainable communities team previously. He was the recipient of a ‘special recognition’ in the Volvo Sustainability Awards 2013 for his project “Towards a walkable and Sustainable Bengaluru: A safe Access project for Indira-nagar Metro Station”. He is a co-author of the Safe Access Manual: Safe Access to Mass Transit Stations in Indian Cities in 2014. His interest in interactive workshops and gamification of urban design processes led him to develop a Safe Access Interactive workshop for citizens to contribute to the design of their transitstation areas. He is a trustee at Repair Cafe Bengaluru Foundation, which works to repair household stuff in order to divert them from the landfill. He is a co-author for an illustrated children’s book on repair titled ‘A stitch in time’.

Purna is an activist, theatre in education (TIE) coach, life skills trainer and HR professional. She is a co-founder of an environmental sustainability initiative called Repair Cafe Bengaluru. The idea of repair was not new to her life, as she has witnessed her parents and grandparents maintain a box of tools ready to tinker when the need arose. Purna left her corporate job to do something more meaningful and that was the beginning of repair café workshops in Bengaluru in 2015.

You can learn more about their work in this article, or engage with Repair Cafe Bengaluru here. 

• Sarah Sao Mai Habib

Sarah is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and cultural worker based in New Mexico & California. Her work engages the interaction between place, space, body, and the constructed borders within & between them. Their practice is an act of remembrance & honoring the resilience that allows them to be & to cultivate balance. Their work embodies a particular weaving of Vietnamese & Iraqi heritage within Turtle Island and its many lineages of liberation work. Most recently, Habib is focused on reawakening earth based skills & ritual as means for healing and reparations on multiple scales.

You can see more highlights on Sarah’s website.

• Linda McIntyre

Linda is an urban planner, award-winning freelance writer, and policy analyst based in New York City and western Michigan. Her interest in maintenance and long-term thinking, planning, and building is based on years of experience, with frequent bouts of widely shared frustration, in journalism and government. She’s hopeful that society’s recent turmoil will ultimately forge new alliances and collaboration toward more sustainable infrastructure and institutions.

Find more about Linda’s work by checking out this story.

We look forward to sharing the reports and findings of our fellows!

We also have an update concerning the Summer Research call as a whole. Given that we were completely blown away by so many of the candidates that submitted their application, in the coming months we will announce special community highlights to share and amplify their incredible work with everyone. We are excited to promote their work in building awareness on maintenance practices and policies!  Stay tuned for more!