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An original essay collection that explores the generative dimensions of fragility, which can help reveal new life-affirming politics and ethics.
At a time when it may be easy to fall into a defeatist melancholia, if not outright pessimism, fragility offers an opportunity for a different kind of world-making. In
Fragility forces us to reckon with the precariousness and contingency of life and to use this reckoning as a starting point to build and nurture life-affirming politics and ethics. The book explores fragility in four categories—bodies, environments, labor, and politics—and proposes to consider in each situation what/who is rendered visible, what/who is made absent, what is considered normal, and what is deemed strong and stable versus what is deemed fragile. The volume includes a strong line-up of leading and emerging scholars from a wide array of disciplines, including anthropology, social studies of science, disabilities studies, and sociology.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Avowing Fragility
Fernando Domínguez Rubio
Part I: Bodies
2 A Healthy Breakfast for Your Child: Maintenance, Care, and the Persistence of Fragility
Annemarie Mol
3 Care as Attention to Fragility and Confronting Resistance: Parents’ Narratives of Care Practices with Multiply Disabled Children
Myriam Winance
4 Conversation with Lucy Suchman
Part II: Environments
5 The Fragility of a Mighty Process: Capital and Cattle Mutually Assist Their Reproduction
Marisol de la Cadena and Santiago Martínez Medina
6 Contamination Chores
Max Liboiron
7 Conversation with María Puig de la Bellacasa
Part III: Labor
8 Care in Fragments: Ecologies of Support Beyond Repair
Tomás Sánchez Criado and Vincent Duclos
9 Fragility, Capacity, and the Work of Repair in the Timber Plantations of South Africa
Thomas Cousins
10 Conversation with Geof Bowker
Part IV: Politics
11 Sovereignty and the Weakness of the King: Regimes of Care at Rochefort
Chandra Mukerji
12 The Fragility of Ice: Cryohuman Relations in Times of Collapse
Cymene Howe
13 Conversation with Steve Jackson
14 Conclusion: What Fragility Does
Jérôme Denis and David Pontille
Contributors
Index
About the author
Jérôme Denis is Professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in the Center for the Sociology of Innovation, Mines Paris-PSL. With David Pontille, he is the author of The Care of Things: Ethics and Politics of Maintenance.
David Pontille is Senior Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), in the Center for the Sociology of Innovation, Mines Paris-PSL. With Jérôme Denis, he is the author of The Care of Things: Ethics and Politics of Maintenance.
Fernando Domínguez Rubio is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego. His most recent book is Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum.
