As two traditional practices performed by rural communities in Colombia, crafting and weaving can be reframed as ontologies that embody alternative material orders and forms of repair. In this context, we explore two specific initiatives: the Crafted Empathy Chair developed by members of campesinosocial movements in Cauca and Nariño, and Interweaving Material Encounters, a series of collaborative spaces involving women from textile collectives from Chocó, Antioquia, and Bolivar. In the process of exploringthese initiatives, we reflect on the role of nonhumans as technologies that allow our interlocutors to share their affect. In addition to discussing strategies for engaging in affective relations when dealing with the aftermath of war violence, we describe how these arrangements affectus as a part of the audience. Thus, we propose the term affecting infrastructureto conceptualize how crafting and weaving can foster everyday spaces and shared grounds for the emergence of emotional engagements as alternative modes of repair

Tech communities are groups that come together to engage with particular technologies. In describing two instances of such communities—hacker- and makerspaces in the United States, and the crafting activities of peasant movements in Colombia—we explore the ways in which their activities exceed their focus on and use of technology and find that practices of hacking and crafting are embedded in imaginaries of attentiveness and care. The use of technology is thus intertwined with the production of particular affects rather than being a goal in itself. We propose the notion of more-than-tech communities as a means of highlighting the ways in which there will, in such communities, always be more at stake than relationships and interactions with technology.

Following the regulations dictated by the Law of Victims in 2012, representatives of the Colombian government have engaged in the task of registering and compensating victims of human rights perpetrations as a result of war violence. These registration procedures, mostly processing the applications of people on the move inside the national territory, are consolidated in the Official Record of Victims (RUV). The RUV enjoys international visibility as an exemplar project of post-conflict reparation and technological success of state bureaucracy. This success, however, relies upon overlooked material practices of inscription and assessment involved in processing the statements of millions of applicants. Whereas the RUV enacts boundaries of rights restitution as a state project, ethnographic excerpts about its inscription practices, assessment procedures, and data production rubrics complicate the broadly promoted success of post-conflict reparation. As other bordering technologies, the RUV demarcates boundaries of inclusion and exclusion by enacting visible forms of identification of which Internal Displacement is a predominant part. In this process, the forms and assessment practices prioritize applicants’ narrations that are consistent with the official version of the armed conflict while also making invisible divergent accounts that contest it.

Following the regulations dictated by the Law of Victims in 2012, representatives of the Colombian government have engaged in the task of registering and compensating victims of human rights perpetrations as a result of war violence. These registration procedures, mostly processing the applications of people on the move inside the national territory, are consolidated in the Official Record of Victims (RUV). The RUV enjoys international visibility as an exemplar project of post-conflict reparation and technological success of state bureaucracy. This success, however, relies upon overlooked material practices of inscription and assessment involved in processing the statements of millions of applicants. Whereas the RUV enacts boundaries of rights restitution as a state project, ethnographic excerpts about its inscription practices, assessment procedures, and data production rubrics complicate the broadly promoted success of post-conflict reparation. As other bordering technologies, the RUV demarcates boundaries of inclusion and exclusion by enacting visible forms of identification of which Internal Displacement is a predominant part. In this process, the forms and assessment practices prioritize applicants’ narrations that are consistent with the official version of the armed conflict while also making invisible divergent accounts that contest it.

Although in other parts of my work I have stayed with the trouble (Haraway2018) of the cynicism and paradoxical relations assembled in population (migration)management infrastructures, in this chapter I pursue a different line of inquiry. On thisoccasion, I wonder about the worlds exceeding governmental reparation andsolidarity in Colombia. While engaging with protests in the streets of Bogotá, I havecome across material arrangements and experiences which shed light aboutalternative ways developed by my interlocutors to reclaim justice beyond the officialchannels of reparation and solidarity. Thus, I will share my enthusiasm for particularmaterial transformative practices (Naji, 2009) that I have followed while tracing hownon-humans participate in the material politics of alternative repair. Hence, I willdescribe these practices as inter-embodied through the nearness, through the being-with-others, in this case also with humans and non-humans (Ahmed and Stacey,2001; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011).

This visual essay draws on an autoethnographic study to present snapshots of mundane academic practice during the pandemic, using these to reflect on care and care practices within academia. Our approach is inspired by a “pinboard” (Law 2007): we use an echo of the two-dimensional space the pinboard offers to present our material through logics of juxtaposition and resonance, rather than attempting to craft a linear argument.

This paper argues for a line of inquiry in the intersection between migration studies and STS work around the notion of material politics in alternative spaces. Drawing on multisited ethnographic inputs, I describe arrangements of cooperation coexisting with post-conflict reparation in Colombia and governmental humanitarianism in Greece. I follow material practices transforming objects into arrangements of remembrance and collective support and address the orders enacted by these practices as alternative infrastructures challenging infrastructures of migration control. The notion of alternative infrastructures offers the possibility to epistemically explore an overlooked angle by citizenship studies and STS; it engages with the objects and relations embedded in the materiality of everyday life and its politics beyond the boundaries of instituted forms of citizenship.