This techno-anthropological master’s thesis takes the point of departure in the Danish repair cafés within the organization Repair Café Denmark. Repair cafés are places where voluntary repairers help visitors to repair their broken items for free. The repair café concept is part of a global movement of repair working towards circular economy and waste minimization, while also attempting to break with the throw-away culture.
In addition to literature in the field of repair cafés, the empirical basis for this thesis is a comprehensive ethnographic fieldwork with visits to six different repair cafés in the metropolitan area of Copenhagen, where qualitative methods of participant observations and loosely structured interviews were central. In addition, eight semi-structured interviews with repair café affiliates, one interview with a repre-sentant from Environmental Center Amager, one interview with an expert in voluntariness, and one interview with an expert in circular economy have also been conducted. Through insights from the ethnographic fieldwork, it has been possible to analyze the practices of the six repair cafés by applying Social Practice Theory as the main theoretical approach. With this, it is highlighted how the practices of the repair cafés are performed through the interdependency of competences, materials, and mean-ings, with similarities and differences in, i.a., repair competences, the physical spaces, and values re-garding voluntariness. These similarities and differences have been presented to as well as discussed by repair café affiliates at a knowledge exchange workshop called ‘The Good Repair Café’ as part of this master’s thesis process. These discussions showed breeding ground for a strengthening of the repair café concept across the individual repair cafés in Repair Café Denmark. A strengthening of Repair Café Denmark in the network of repair, circular economy, and waste minimization through the strategic use of statistical repair data as an interessement device is also discussed in this thesis. This is done with Actor-Network Theory as the theoretical point of departure, and results in a concrete pro-posal for a tool which Repair Café Denmark may use to accumulate repair data across the individual repair café