Orange feelings and reparative readings, or how I learned to know alternative organization at Roskilde Festival

Abstract

Taking inspiration from Sedgwick [(2002). “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, edited by E. K. Sedgwick, 123–152. Durham, NC: Duke University Press], I argue that a turn towards alternative organization(s) must be accompanied by a concurrent turn towards a reparative methodology, in order that critical scholars are able to know an alternative. Based on engagement with Roskilde Festival, I show how easily critical studies become paranoid, precluding surprise and, in turn, alternative understandings, as well as alternative things to understand. Whereas paranoid critical inquiry is informed by the hermeneutics of suspicion, I suggest that reparative readings may come from a place of wonder (MacLure [(2013a). Researching Without Representation? Language and Materiality in Post-Qualitative Methodology.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26 (6): 658–667. doi:10.1080/09518398.2013.788755, (2013b). “The Wonder of Data.” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 13 (4): 228–232]). This article contributes to debates in critical management studies about the purpose of and possibility for critical engagement with organizations. By sharing ethnographic moments that mattered to me in their affective capacity to make me experience wonder about critical engagement, I show how a paranoid reader may become reparatively positioned and demonstrate what knowledge may be produced through reparative readings.

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