Failures

While failure and dysfunction are most obvious when occurring on a large scale, they also mark mundane interactions and intimate encounters. Failure not only practically inhibits the use of technology, infrastructures or facilities, or reveals a lack of skill, care, or forethought, but it also becomes a diagnostic moment that allows people to make narrative sense of their conditions, and possibly even derive an impetus for future-making. When things do not hold, we can inquire into particular ways of knowing and story-telling. The ethnographic analyses in this thread show that failure can be more complexly tied to success than is often assumed. Curated by Laura Mafizzoli, Chakad Ojani and Rozafa Berisha.

Laura Mafizzoli graduated in Social Anthropology at the University of Venice. Her MA dissertation examined the experiences of displacement amongst a village of Georgian IDPs escaped from South Ossetia during the wars in 1991-1992 and 2008. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.


Chakad Ojani is a PhD student at the University of Manchester. He has conducted fieldwork on fog capture and atmospheric attunements in Peru. His research areas include materials and materiality, infrastructure and environment, science and technology, and much besides.


Rozafa Berisha is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the multiple ways in which young women envisage and make their futures in the ethnically divided city of Southern Mitrovica, Kosovo.