Learning to fix: knowledge, collaboration and mobile phone repair in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Practices of technology repair in developing country contexts play crucial and often overlooked roles in supporting ICTD goals of access and sustainability. They also constitute complex and neglected sites of technical skill, knowledge, and learning. Building on original ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the explicit, tacit, and social knowledges that shape practice and expertise in the mobile phone repair markets of urban Bangladesh. We document forms of learning and collaboration central to the production and innovation of repair skills and knowledge, and show how these processes operate at the intersection of global knowledge flows and local efforts to access, contextualize and situate that knowledge. We conclude by arguing for repair as an underappreciated site of third-world technical practice and expertise, and reflecting on how ICTD research might better take such practices into account.