Knowledge Practices in Repairer-Participant Interactions: A Grounded Theory Study of Repair Cafés

Date

2026-8-21

Author

Kurt Özkara, Öykü

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Repair Cafés are free, volunteer-run events where people bring broken household items and fix them together with volunteer repairers. The movement presents itself as maintaining and spreading repair expertise, yet whether and how this happens between a repairer and a participant has rarely been examined closely. This study asks how knowledge practices are enacted within repairer-participant interactions in Repair Cafés. The live exchange at the repair table has been approached around its edges more than studied as a process in its own right. The study follows grounded theory methodology and examines six sites in Germany through eleven observations over nine months and twenty-two semi-structured interviews with repairers and participants. Open, axial, and selective coding identified dividing the repair work as the core category. For policy, the organizational type of the RC decides what gets learned, so funding schemes should not treat RCs as a single instrument; the encounter is where the difference between a repaired object and passing on a skill is decided.

Subject Keywords

Repair Café, Knowledge practices, Grounded theory, Repair knowledge, Germany

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/120086

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis