Get Along Comrade – Tinkering as Care for Freedom

This study will focus on practices of institutional ‘tinkering’. The dictionary defines tinkering as an “attempt to repair or improve something in a casual or desultory way”. Anthropologist Annemarie Mol (2010) understand tinkering as a fundamental component of care practices within and outside of institutions, a mix of experimenting and improvising which has the capacity of “holding together that which does not necessarily hold together.” Following on from Mol’s insight, she wishes to operationalize tinkering as a specific form of care that is particularly suited to the definition provided by David Graeber, who defined care as the “labour aimed at maintaining or augmenting another person’s freedom.” Thus, institutional tinkering can be framed as a practice of care characterized by finding workarounds, adaptations and tools to enhance the freedom of others in a dysfunctional institutional setting that embodies an unequal power dynamic.