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Maintenance and Care
... Maintenance tasks are often perceived as less important or less interesting than design work because they are primarily associated with cleaning and preservation rather than innovation. However, Puig de la Bellacasa (2011), Mattern (2018), and Young (2020) argue that maintenance practices should not be understood as static-keeping things as they are-but rather as dynamic processes that demand f lexible reactions to unpredictable situations, actions, and actors. Thinking of maintenance as a process, Young (2020, 362) asks us to "consider the life of an artifact not to be punctuated by separate phases of making and using, but rather as a continuous process of growth." ...
... Based on the literature cited above and my participation in mapping projects with Indig enous partners, I humbly propose that the fire keeper could be a useful role for cartographers to occupy, one that mobilizes IDS principles in mapping work in ways that Indig enous people have repeatedly asked of us (Kukutai and Taylor 2016 ;Carroll et al. 2019;Lucchesi 2020;Carroll et al. 2021). The idea is not to create a whole new concept, but rather to propose a concrete application of CARE principles (Carroll et al. 2020, O'Brien et al. 2024) centred in IDS (Kukutai and Taylor 2016), maintenance (Mattern 2018), and data feminism (D'Ignazio & Klein 2020). ...
... Like Mattern (2018) and Young (2020), I think of maintenance as making, not merely preserving things. Maintenance is a creative act which leads to new artifacts. ...
This paper explores the critical yet often overlooked aspect of maintenance in decolonial and Indigenous mapping projects. Indigenous communities across Canada have developed alliances with university researchers to develop mapping projects that communicate their relationships to land to outsiders. However, without ongoing maintenance and care, maps can deteriorate or be repurposed in ways that can be harmful to Indigenous communities. I introduce the “fire keeper” as a person or group of people tasked with maintenance, care, and responsibility for the life cycle of maps incorporating Indigenous data. Using the Kanehsatà:ke Land Defense mapping project developed with a Kanehsatakeró:non Land Defender as a case study, I describe how the role of the fire keeper facilitated the adaptation and evolution of the map in response to the Land Defender’s changing objectives. Maintaining the Kanehsatà:ke Land Defense mapping project became an exploration of options rather than a rush to deliver an output. Based on a series of four semi-structured interviews that I conducted with (1) a campaigner, (2) a digital media strategist, (3) university students, and (4) a Québécois history enthusiast, the Land Defender was able to make strategic decisions about how the Kanehsatà:ke Land Defense mapping project should be deployed and which objectives and audiences, if any, would best support the reclamation of Kanehsatakeró:non lands while also protecting their geospatial and archival intellectual property. The paper concludes by encouraging mapmakers to dedicate more time, energy, and resources to map maintenance than they currently do.
... In addition to the scarcity of literature, a second problem arises: this literature has a very partial perspective, not only due to the pronounced viewpoint of engineers and economists, as noted by Shannon Mattern (2018) Hence, pausing to study the everyday maintenance of architectures from the Bogotá periphery and through an ethnographic lens is, in itself, an act of maintenance. Our task will involve rescuing literature, drawing connections between disciplines, connecting threads, patching holes, or amplifying small voices (Mattern, 2018). Paying attention to details, it is difficult to overlook the role of corporeality and materiality in disassembling practices. ...
... This becomes evident when looking at the constructions surrounding Casa del Viento, where one could see -in the windows frames, closures, planks, or the buildings' railings-diverse compositions that testify to the many lives of the materials. (Mattern, 2018) that include informal economies, recyclers, self-construction of housing or infrastructure, tinkering, and transient and improvised fixes; but also, more intangible maintenance work such as the regular organization of communal pots to take care of common spaces. ...
This paper attempts to ethnographically reflect on how material vulnerability is conceived and considered in practices of communal sustenance of architectures in trouble. Drawing on theories of maintenance, care, and repair, we will dwell on the learnings cultivated during a socio-material process that unfolded in response to the burning of a communal library in the southern periphery of the city of Bogotá. The collective practices of sustenance deployed to take care of the threatened architecture help us bring to the forefront questions of (I) distributed agency and ecology of practices; (II) unanticipated future and alternative temporalities; (III) creative and generative responses to damage or conflict; as well as (V) tentative and (IV) ‘opening of black boxes’ methods. Through the ethnographic analysis of the disassembling process, we will problematize the socio-material ecosystems needed to sustain lives in a ‘broken world’.
... Specifically, it entails analyzing how the residues of this perennially renewing impulse are reconfigured by practices that respond to current and changing needs. In a context of emigration and collapse, managing vacant spaces allows for the adoption of modes of action that operate on the residual as "epistemic and experiential reality" (Mattern, 2018), revealing not only infrastructural decomposition but also cracks in the foundational narratives upon which modernity has been built. ...
... The significance of maintenance and repair lies not so much in the production of novelty from a material perspective but in the capacity of these practices to preserve a certain order and extend human values (Graham & Thrift, 2007;Jackson, 2014;Mattern, 2018). For Steven Jackson, "repair occupies and constitutes an aftermath" (2014, p. 223). ...
This article examines the caretaking practices of vacant domestic spaces amid a migratory crisis and generalized collapse. Caracas is conceptualized as a 'city of aftermath', where the material residues of modernity are reconfigured in response to the logic of crisis and the needs of migrants, re-signifying spaces and extending their life beyond the conditions of their production. The text is centered on the figure of the caretaker. Based on interviews, site visits, and photography, the article examines the daily routines of Carlos, who looks after more than twenty apartments in Caracas. His work is entwined with migrants’ trajectories and local needs, generating new economies and support networks around the maintenance and adaptation of vacant spaces. In this way, caretaking practices offer clues for a reading of the city that transcends progress/decline oppositions and their respective imaginaries: the new and the ruin.
... Privilege influences caring for or repairing clothing. In marginalized communities, repairing more expensive items is necessary or a burden, not necessarily an alternative to purchasing new ones (Mattern, 2018). Wearing visibly mended clothes as a form of rebellion against the dominant 5 fashion culture is only for those who mend by choice. ...
... By acknowledging care's dynamic, ongoing nature, we can embrace a more expansive vision of care as a social practice that shapes relationships, communities, and societies. (Tronto, 1998) More than taking preventative maintenance measures to keep something in working order, we can look at repair as a critical mindset and practice to enhance not just the utility and value (Chapman & Chapman, 2022;Jackson, 2014;Mattern, 2018; The Care Collective et al., 2020) of clothing but to move into future states. Recognizing this temporal dimension of care is crucial for understanding its transformative potential and role in shaping our futures. ...
... Madeleine Akrich refers to these assumptions about technology uses/users as scripts [6]. Sometimes designers create scripts to work against uses/users, such as deliberately making consumer electronics hard to repair to encourage people to buy new devices [62]. Even when designers try to work with users, human-computer interaction can still break down when users fail or are unable to follow designers' plans [99]. ...
Queer people are often discussed as targets of bias, harm, or discrimination in research on generative AI. However, the specific ways that queer people engage with generative AI, and thus possible uses that support queer people, have yet to be explored. We conducted a workshop study with 13 queer artists, during which we gave participants access to GPT-4 and DALL-E 3 and facilitated group sensemaking activities. We found our participants struggled to use these models due to various normative values embedded in their designs, such as hyper-positivity and anti-sexuality. We describe various strategies our participants developed to overcome these models' limitations and how, nevertheless, our participants found value in these highly-normative technologies. Drawing on queer feminist theory, we discuss implications for the conceptualization of "state-of-the-art" models and consider how FAccT researchers might support queer alternatives.
... Against the myth of physical, automated, and reliable urban systems, Global South scholarship has shown that urban infrastructure depends on human inputs, including the labor required to operate, maintain, and repair infrastructures on a daily basis (Anand 2017;Björkman 2018;De Coss-Corzo 2021;Fredricks 2018) and the human bodies that substitute or make up for infrastructures when these are absent or fail (Truelove and Ruszczyk 2022). Emergent feminist inquiry into infrastructural labor has revealed the inequalities embedded in infrastructural labors and the gendered power relations that render some types of infrastructural work (e.g., repair) or workers (i.e., raced, classed, gendered) undervalued and disposable (Anand 2020;Fredericks 2014;Gidwani 2015;Mattern 2018). In this chapter, we build on and extend these feminist contributions by exploring the gendered dynamics of infrastructural work producing unequal patterns and unjust conditions of engagement at the water kiosks of Lilongwe, Malawi.< ...
Since Abdu Malique Simone (2004) conceptualized people as “infrastructures,” numerous scholars have paid attention to the “human lives, labor, and bodies that are not only enrolled in but constitute infrastructure” (Doherty 2017, 194; emphasis original) (e.g., Anand 2020; Doherty 2017; Fredricks 2018; Truelove and Ruszczyk 2022). Against the myth of physical, automated, and reliable urban systems, Global South scholarship has shown that urban infrastructure depends on human inputs, including the labor required to operate, maintain, and repair infrastructures on a daily basis (Anand 2017; Björkman 2018; De Coss-Corzo 2021; Fredricks 2018) and the human bodies that substitute or make up for infrastructures when these are absent or fail (Truelove and Ruszczyk 2022). Emergent feminist inquiry into infrastructural labor has revealed the inequalities embedded in infrastructural labors
and the gendered power relations that render some types of infrastructural work (e.g., repair) or workers (i.e., raced, classed, gendered) undervalued and disposable (Anand 2020; Fredericks 2014; Gidwani 2015; Mattern 2018). In this chapter, we build on and extend these feminist contributions by exploring the gendered dynamics of infrastructural work producing unequal patterns
and unjust conditions of engagement at the water kiosks of Lilongwe, Malawi.
... The efficiency and longevity of communication routes, services, and tools are fundamental to any societies or businesses: efficiency is a constant effort secured by several technical practices and, above all, maintenance; longevity is secured by building technologies that last or making decisions that can be evaluated over long terms. All the contributions deal with some aspects of this triangle and can bring to communication studies (but also STS, history of technology, media studies, and other related disciplines) new perspectives on how to see and, literally, take care of its future (more on care and maintenance in Mattern, 2018). This agenda can also help the emergence of a "new" concept and, practically, a new way of doing communication research: focusing on maintenance culture(s). ...
This chapter serves as an introduction to the whole book and, in the last section, provides a short overview of all the chapters. The aim is to provide a theoretical and critical overview of the three main issues and keywords found in the volume: communication, maintenance, and Longue Durée. All three have separate histories and disciplines that study them, but in this book, they are combined. Furthermore, this chapter aims to define one of the most relevant findings emerging in the following chapters which is the existence of different “maintenance culture(s)”. Finally, as a proper book introduction should do, readers will also find a summary of the structure and main contents of the following chapters in the last paragraph.
... Engaging with other living beings generates sensitivity and empathy, as well as different reflections, thoughts, viewpoints, and forms of engagement previously unexperienced, only possible with practical involvement with one another. Moreover, working together in this proposition implies relationships of care that are particular to these design practices, triggering greater attention and responsibility (Keune, 2021;Mattern, 2018). The use of the Përisi fungi (Marasmius yanomami) by Yanomami women in basketry is a fine example of practices of care, coexistence, and making-with. ...
Due to the drastic transformations in the conditions for life that are occurring in the Anthropocene, a reevaluation of the ways of being and designing onto the planet is necessary.
... My thinking about noise is also influenced by a third perspective. Studies across the social sciences and humanities have developed concepts such as 'broken data' (Pink et al., 2018), 'breakdown' (Alirezabeigi et al., 2020), an 'aesthetics of failure' (Cascone, 2000), 'leaking' (Chun, 2016), 'lively data' (Lupton, 2015), 'maintenance' (Mattern, 2018), 'repair' (Pink et al., 2019), 'rotted data' (Boellstorff, 2013) or 'zombie media' (Hertz & Parikka, 2012) to consider the kinds of messiness and the doingness of digital devices that this chapter foregrounds. While these concepts have proven helpful in thinking about when things go wrong, each concept metaphor has its limits. ...
... Finally, our study aims to call for the recentring of the agency of public, private and third sector actors involved in the design of EdTech policies. Just as there is a risk in romanticising maintenance and repair (Mattern 2018), there is also one in essentialising breakdowns. We understand that contrary to what some repair studies suggest, breakdown can never occur solely due to the passing of time or the force of natural material decay and erosion. ...
This article offers insights into the everyday postdigital school life of two schools from two different world regions—Argentina and Germany. Based on ethnographic research in both contexts, it traces the introduction of one educational technology in each case, from the moment of its conception in policy documents to its landing in schools, its appropriation by various school actors and its integration into the socio-technical infrastructure of the classroom. Although both schools are situated differently and both technologies—a learning management system and a tablet computer—are of different quality, the article demonstrates the existence of a remarkable commonality in the journey of both educational technologies: their breakdown and the repair practices performed by various school actors. Breakdown and repair are analysed and conceptualised with reference to the Broken World Thinking exercise. By applying an Ethnography of Global Connections, the locally identified practices in both schools are framed as manifestations of global digitalisation processes in education. The article aims to shift the focus of critical EdTech studies towards two socio-material forces that are commonly addressed separately: material disruption and reassembling (and all the friction in between).
... We provide details of our methodology and outline how care informed our collaborative engagement with the Park, before presenting our findings on how care unfolds expansively across people and place to (reactively) repair care deficits and (proactively) generate new care relations. We close with a critical discussion of alternative infrastructures of care that simultaneously recognises opportunities for "spaces for hope in dark times" (Hobart and Kneese, 2020: 2), whilst cautioning against the romanticisation of such care practices by acknowledging their limits (Mattern, 2018). In doing so, we contribute to the complexity of care theorising by revealing the challenges of care provision that stem from a position of necessity and repair. ...
Care is an activity vital to making the world liveable. Alternative infrastructures of care have emerged that re-centre care and repair within everyday life. These infrastructures often require more care to address care deficits and repair the social fabric of society; however, insights are limited as to the implications of demands on people and the places they reside for such extra care. Through an ethnographic study of a community food hub in an area of entrenched deprivation, we examine how an alternative infrastructure of care is built in practice. We demonstrate how care unfolds expansively across people and place to (reactively) repair care deficits and (proactively) generate new care relations. We contribute to the complexity of care theorising by revealing the challenges of care provision that stem from a position of necessity and repair. We offer a critical discussion of alternative infrastructures of care that simultaneously recognises the opportunities for hope, whilst acknowledging their limits.
... to thrive and provide continuous harvest, gardens need ongoing care, maintenance, and patience (Mattern, 2018). By forming a symbiotic relationship with the garden one must listen to its needs, not solely ask of it. ...
Gardening the Cybernetic Meadow is a research-creation project that engages with the fields of interdisciplinary art, ecology, and sustainable energy technologies drawing energy from bio-matter (soil microbes). Microbial fuel cells (hereby MFCs) are a type of bio-based fuel cell, or more broadly a soil-based generator and battery. MFCs are a regenerative energy technology that use soil as medium and uptake energy through collecting by-products of microbial metabolism. The outcomes of Gardening the Cybernetic Meadow's research-creation are disseminated through multiple modes of knowledge sharing, shifting away from a primary reliance on the traditional written thesis. Inspired by research-creation frameworks of scholars such as Natalie Loveless (2019), it distributes the thesis' research results through three methods. 1) an interdisciplinary, participatory art installation (sharing the title of this thesis); 2) an open-source microbial fuel cell fabrication guide generated through the documentation of the research-creation process; 3) this component, the written thesis. Guided by theoretical frameworks encompassing critical making, relational aesthetics, and temporal aesthetics, the project not only challenges traditional modes of research dissemination but also offers a tangible platform for engaging diverse audiences across artistic and scientific domains. Gardening the Cybernetic Meadow aspires to reshape future inquiries by propelling investigations into sustainable energy, ecological interdependence, and experiential learning. This undertaking exemplifies the fusion of creativity and technology while nurturing a dynamic ecosystem of collaboration, contemplation, and transformative thought.
... As black feminists have noted, black women have been doing waged reproductive work in white homes for a long time, and this did not contribute to any revalorization of their work (Davis 1981;hooks 2014). Submitting an activity for exchange as a commodity, measurable by units of time in return for wages, does not necessarily lead to its revaluing, and we might wish to remember that "we care for things not because they produce value, but because they already have value" (Mattern 2018). In fact, feminist theorists of reproductive work have exposed the limits inherent in the commodification of this activity and the resulting "crisis of care." ...
While the ethics of care has considered the possibility that caring occurs for the environment, it often remains silent about the caregiving that humans receive from the environment. This essay suggests that ecological justice requires humans to consider themselves not only as ecological caregivers, but also as care receivers from more-than-human earth dwellers. The argument is built by first accounting for the diverse forms of care that humans receive from other-than-humans. The focus then turns to eco-feminist and eco-Marxist thought to denaturalize this care, highlighting how capitalist economies put other-than-humans to work and appropriate their efforts to maintain the world. The fact that they cannot demand a salary and that the commodification of life increases its depletion leads to an examination of how the conceptual recognition of more-than-human care can be translated politically. The article sketches how the political tensions at work in practices and conceptions of care outlined by feminist and indigenous thought could allow to engage more critically with environmental issues, notably by blending environmental humanities’ emphasis on affective dispositions and attachments towards other-than-humans, with materialist ambitions to highlight exploitation and invisible labor.
... While the material and aspirational scope of large-scale infrastructural projects draws much attention, critical infrastructure scholars are also now emphasizing important ecologies of maintenance and repair (Graham and Thrift, 2007;Denis and Pontille, 2015;Ramakrishnan et al, 2021). Shannon Mattern (2018) calls for more consideration of maintenance as a theoretical framework and political cause that straddles scholarship and practice. Engagement with and perceptions of 'defective' or antiquated infrastructures tell us much about the social and political relations of place at the same time as illegal or informal service provision fills in the gaps of absent or unreliable urban systems (Simone, 2004). ...
... Care, for collections and for people, has likewise always been a part of librarianship and cultural heritage professions. And care in these professions has received renewed critical attention, following recent work in science and technology studies (Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015), workers' insistence that care and maintenance are labor (Mattern 2018), and calls to reckon with the violent colonial foundations of care as performed by cultural institutions (Umolu 2020). There have been critical studies of the ways in which care in libraries is always shaped by raced, gendered embodiment and especially by histories of white saviorism (Ettarh 2018), and there have been offerings of alternatives. ...
... Discussions pointing at this direction are also emerging among designers, challenging the traditional understanding of design as a future oriented practice merely focused on innovation and making new things; see Tonkinwise (2014), Soro, Lawrence and Taylor (2019), Lindström and Ståhl (2023), Crosby and Stein (2020). heuristic repair in itself (Mattern 2018). Likewise, the ethnography describes how socio-material (in)stability, the persistence of things and how repair and brokenness are hardly final processes. ...
This paper discusses the relevance of repair actions for the maintenance of social bonds, suggesting that these interventions have heuristic possibilities to address the crises of our time. The general argument points to important questions, such as the distinction between caretaking, endurance and resilience. Building on a literature review and ten years of fieldwork in two different locations (Estonia and Portugal), it develops an argument for post-brokenness and repair as a heuristic of the contemporary social condition. The different examples here included show the complex temporality of fixing interventions as well as the urge to understanding contextual nuances of socio-material in/stability and damage. A multi-sited attention to fixing interventions allows us to comprehend the processes and conditions under which certain things acquire socio-material stability against the grain. In this sense, repair work is presented as socially and politically-loaded by putting things to some order, activating other kinds of relations and holding together different dimensions of care.
This article attempts to provide a definition of “mental infrastructure” that would be compatible with some of the lessons drawn from disability studies as they have flourished over the past decades. It does so by taking as a test case the “attentional crisis” much discussed in recent years. We start by surveying canonical definitions of infrastructural power, showing how most of them already take into account a complex entanglement between material, institutional and imaginary realities. A second section considers more specifically the mental aspect of infrastructural assemblages, while a third one revisits them under the minoritarian light shed by disability studies. “Repairing” our mental infrastructures, as observed in the field of attention studies, does not merely aim at “recovering” a mental ability for idealized concentration: it rather calls for communicational infrastructures capable of putting multiple (minoritarian and majoritarian) perspectives “on par with” each other. A final section identifies six moves which can help construct the multi-perspectivist mental infrastructures we desperately need in order to remantle our cognitively dissonant worldviews and to negotiate a just cohabitation on planet Earth in the Anthropocene.
Enlivening is an increasingly common response to urban challenges and seeks to make urban space ‘liveable’ and ‘healthy’. A central tenet in achieving the enlivened city, is an active citizen who travels by sustainable modes, namely active travel. Whilst there is an increasing impetus upon producing an inclusive template of the active citizen within policy, it is our encounters with the materiality of active travel infrastructures within our everyday lives as disabled people that impact upon our ability to exercise citizenship rights and upon our sense of belonging within enlivening. Using an autoethnographic approach to my own experiences as a disabled tricyclist in Greater Manchester, UK, this paper demonstrates how through both encounters and non-encounters with access control barriers on traffic-free routes, the city is rendered less liveable, rather than enlivened, for many disabled people. I also attend to practices of care and repair related to infrastructures of active travel, and how these further consolidate embodied experiences of (non)citizenship. Recognising that such every day, small-scale interactions are the foundations of larger social forms, I demonstrate how autoethnography can contribute to informing inclusive policy and practice, in this case by demonstrating how practice needs to match rhetoric of inclusive, enlivened futures within Greater Manchester, as well as more broadly, if disabled people are to enact our citizenship through active mobility and be part of enlivened urban futures.
El siguiente artículo profundiza en la noción de reparación tecnológica, explorando sus escalas y dimensiones políticas. Para ello, se revisan distintos tipos de reparación por los cuales puede pasar una cámara fotográfica averiada. Se mapean diversas iniciativas, tanto sociales como empresariales, que han surgido alrededor del mundo a raíz del creciente interés en las formas populares de reutilización para comprender la reparación como un pensamiento a largo plazo, donde están contenidos el aprecio y afecto por algunos de los objetos que nos rodean y una fuente relevante de fuerzas económicas y creativas.
In this paper, we argue that the political right is a coherent object of analysis and a powerful presence in US politics, because it possesses a spatially-informed alternative theory and practice of society. We thus propose the concept of battlespace as an analytic to understand the political right’s project. The right constructs its alternative theory and practice of society, we argue, through spatial tactics that seek to generate collective experience around the feeling of embattlement. We then analyze the ways in which this collective experience is constructed for and with participants through tactical performances. We understand tactical performances as a constellation of creative, improvised, and adversarial actions that spatially create shared experiences among participants. We then trace three modalities of action – hostility, frontierization, and validation – that characterize the tactical performances of the political right. What unites the right against racial, gender, and sexual self-determination is its ability to forge a common identity and experience through an alternative vision of society. Tactical performances are enacted to nullify and threaten such heterogeneity and processes of pluralization. Finally, using the concept of postdemocracy, we discuss how these spatial tactics undermine democracy’s conditions of possibility.
Compilación editada para la revista Post(s) sobre debates contemporáneos alrededor de distintas prácticas curatoriales en las ciencias sociales y las humanidades. Recoge contribuciones, principalmente, de Latinoamérica.
Recientemente la reparación ha ganado visibilidad como marco teórico, ético y metodológico en diversas discusiones académicas y políticas. A tal grado que, poco a poco, emergen los «estudios de reparación» como un nuevo enfoque transdisciplinario de investigación. A través de los lentes de la reparación, académicos de diversas formaciones están mapeando una gama amplia de actividades, habilidades y subjetividades. Este artículo examina las principales reflexiones teóricas sobre el tema y algunos de los pasos metodológicos para realizar un proyecto transmedia sobre la cultura de la reparación, en el que dialogan un documental, una tesis doctoral y un docuweb.
In this article, the author proposes thinking of Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium as a manifestation of plant companionship, a term she uses to describe the practice of noticing plant life and acknowledging it for what it is, caring for and about it, protecting and defending it, and remaining humbly open to what we do not (yet) know about it. She traces an ecofeminist genealogy of plant companionship by gleaning connections between Luxemburg’s political ecology and the work of contemporary women artists who engage with the politics of human relationships with plants – Milena Bonilla, Marwa Arsanios and Jumana Manna – as well as John Berger’s writings and drawings that highlight the epistemic and ontological openness that is required of humans in life-affirming engagements with the nonhuman. Relationally thinking about struggles from different geographies and temporalities, the author believes, can draw together the two most pressing causes of our time – human liberation and earth liberation.
In an age of apparent disrepair as the climate crisis takes hold and neoliberalism fails to liberate, as the cost of living rises and rights are retracted, the need for a reparative turn is overdue. But what is repair? If repair is contained in moments of total breakdown, then the reparative acts of care that sustain the world are denied. Countering these forces and the urgency prescribed by the crisis of disrepair and in what too often appears as the proprietary epistemology of repair, in this paper I offer an account of ‘repairability’. Structured in relation to the reparative gaze of feminist theory and poetic thinking, repairability assumes a material trace, I contend, through the vernacular archive of Cuban artist-ethnographer Ernesto Oroza. Oroza’s work offers a compelling case study through which to think the possibility of repair as an act of worldly becoming.
How and what do we make through method? This paper imagines the processes of designing and carrying out socio-environmental research through the lens of a slow, creative craft form: sewing a patchworked piece from hand-dyed fabric samples. In doing so, it contributes to thinking about how methodologies are pieced and stitched together from multiple parts. Based on early findings from an extended research project exploring the practice of natural textile dyeing in the UK, I offer a range of textile processes for thinking through the creative dimensions of the doing of methodological work. The quilt-like piece I am attempting to make from plant-dyed fabric is at once the object, objective, and method in this study. I draw on auto-ethnographic reflections on my attempts to begin learning natural dyeing and sewing skills, suggesting piecing, stitching, and steeping may be useful, tactile metaphors for thinking through the early, often messy and uncertain stages of multi-sited and multi-method qualitative research. As such, I build on and extend recent discussions about ‘patchwork ethnography’, an approach recognising that the realities of ethnographic research in practice are often fragmented, non-linear, and intricately shaped by researchers’ everyday lives and commitments. The paper also offers insight into the potentials and pitfalls of intentionally ‘slow’ scholarship that aims to disrupt the urgent temporalities of research projects as they are often imagined.
This paper, 24-Hour Risk City: A Framework for Thinking About Building Infrastructures of Climate Repair in Nairobi and Karachi, explores how climate change, urban violence, and infrastructure shape risks in low-income neighborhoods and informal settlements in Nairobi and Karachi.
The paper provides a framework to understand these risks and examines how communities in the Global South adapt through everyday practices and networks. It highlights the importance of "caring for" communities and considers bodies as infrastructure for climate adaptation. A recommended-read for those interested in urban risks and climate justice in the Global South!
This article analyzes the politics of scale in global development by focusing on a sanitation program in western Kenya. It follows the daily work of a nongovernmental organization that seeks to provide access to chlorine dispensers to millions of people for the purpose of disinfecting water. By engaging with literatures on development and infrastructure, this article proposes reach as an analytic that jointly attends to the aspirations, labors, and uncertain outcomes embedded in scale work. An ethnography of reach emphasizes the temporality of off‐grid infrastructures to capture the ambivalent relationships between aspirations and results and between standardization and adaptation, as well as the unstable nature of care. This proves useful to theorizing expansion as potentially generative of, rather than only inimical to, the good life—thereby troubling the vision of scale making as replication often used to understand development projects and their consequences.
This article collectively discusses creative feminist approaches to ethnographic methods developed in response to challenging social, personal, environmental, and temporal conditions and pressures. Patchwork Ethnography, developed by Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma and Chika Watanabe, recognises mundane pressures, and works with insights and experiences that emerge not only from doing research, but from what happens around the edges. By rendering the many ‘seams’ of research visible and valuable, their approach aims to develop creative, kind, and more generous – yet no less robust – research realities. Drawing inspiration from Patchwork Ethnography this article takes a creative approach to the craft of conversation, valuing the fragments, drawing attention to edges and intersections of our collective thinking, research, and experiences and stitching them together into a unique patchworked piece. Throughout, in the spirit of the theme of this special issue, we ask what kinds of ethnographic methods can create new and different futures? What are, or could be, feminist futures of ethnography?
In forest‐fringe areas of India's Sundarbans, young men at the intersection of low caste and class become invested in electrical repair and maintenance work – as a gendering practice that enacts a specific logic of care. This work takes embodied knowledge (tongue), thoughtful improvisation (tape), and lifelong commitment (time) to fragile things and people in need. Tongue, tape, and time make the difference between good and bad care – between good, honourable men and men who do not or cannot care. In a place of changing aspirations but lasting deprivations, the costs of caring are expensive for men of limited means, and yet the costs of not caring cause the same men to suffer from unanticipated forms of gendered vulnerability. In this article, electrical workers’ caring masculinities are analysed in their political, economic, and moral dimensions to reveal ongoing tensions in the social constitution of (gendered) personhood: as care both obviates and causes ruination, these tensions must be constantly smoothed out for care to maintain its generative potential. Informed by fifteen months of fieldwork on an island of India's Sundarbans, the article seeks to trouble repair and maintenance work as care work – for care both does and undoes both men and things.
Purpose
As social infrastructures, public libraries are increasingly recognised as providing more than access to books and information; librarians’ work is importantly centred around practices of care. However, the ways in which they provide care is poorly researched, let alone conceptualised. This paper explores how this important part of librarians’ daily work is practiced through the lens of infrastructuring.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper first theoretically discusses the concepts of social infrastructuring, care and tinkering. Then, it turns to ethnographic research conducted in the public library networks of three European cities: Vienna (Austria), Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and Malmö (Sweden). The paper comprises empirical materials from all three countries and unpacks 16 librarians’ daily working routines of care through participant observations.
Findings
The empirical analysis resulted in three modes of social infrastructuring in public libraries: (1) maintaining, (2) building connections and (3) drawing boundaries. Practices of care are prominent in each of these infrastructuring modes: librarians infrastructure the library with and via their care practices. Whilst care practices are difficult to quantify and verbalise, they are valuable for library patrons. By using the concept of tinkering, the article conceptualises librarians’ infrastructuring enactments as crucial community-building aspects of libraries.
Originality/value
By focusing on the enactment of social infrastructuring, the paper goes beyond a descriptive approach to understanding public libraries as important social infrastructures. Rather, the paper unpacks how libraries come into being as infrastructuring agencies by highlighting what librarians do and say. Our international study articulates the importance of care practices in public libraries across different national contexts.
In cities nature is taking on a new role as infrastructure, providing essential services in terms of temperature regulation and water management, as well as the provision of habitat for biodiversity conservation. With this turn to green infrastructure have come new challenges to maintenance. Plants are lively things and if they are to perform their infrastructural roles they must be routinely tended to in particular ways. In the context of neoliberal governance, much of this labor falls to volunteer humans. Framed as stewardship, this volunteerism for plant-city thriving is posited as a way to meet maintenance needs while promoting human health and well-being and creating support for nature-based solutions through a sense of ownership and responsibility. While it is thus possible to read stewardship as an enrollment of people and plants into the reproduction of neoliberal urban political ecologies, in this paper I argue that such an analysis overlooks the involution of plants and people that occurs during acts of stewardship. Drawing on ethnographic research with street tree stewards in New York City I explore how vegetal agency draws people into affective, embodied relations. During acts of stewardship, trees act on people and reconfigure their relations in ways that potentially exceed the strictures of stewardship. Rather than allowing stewardship discourses and critiques thereof to be our sole frame for understanding these people-plant relations, we should also consider them from the perspective of vegetal agency and what human-tree involutions do within, around, and to human practices of stewardship.
This article introduces Fairkauf, a charitable thrift store, in Stuttgart, Germany and analyzes its work and participation in alternative economies of reuse, repair, repurposing, sharing, and care, and the store’s contributions to ecological and social sustainability. Thrift stores are contemporary responses to overproduction, hyper-consumption, social inequality, and ecological degradation. This article provides a nuanced ethnographic description of a thrift store. Such stores are often overlooked, yet they play a crucial role in individual and urban sustainability efforts. They are spaces of incidental sustainability that do not loudly advertise their work, but quietly help thrifters pursue more ecological lifestyles and help cities divert huge quantities of materials from landfills and incinerators. Thrift stores’ labor connects thrifters to activities and networks of often similarly hidden sustainability efforts by ordinary people across the world. Theoretically, I engage the role of thrift stores in alternative economies that contribute to more ecologically and socially sustainable lifeworlds and futures.
This paper starts from the point that our current political‐economic‐climate conjuncture demands new engagements at the dynamic interface of climate capitalism. Using two cases of climate capitalist responses to climate challenges, I demonstrate the reparative potentials that emerge from the tensions and ambiguities that typify that conjuncture. In the first case, I examine financialised climate infrastructure in Jakarta, Indonesia, that promises to protect the city from flooding while enriching city elites, but against which diverse social movements and collectives have organised. The second case is about a cooperative energy provider in Australia, operating on the terrain of a neoliberalised electricity market and climate change, and working towards multifaceted repair by collectivising and redistributing surplus and modelling democratic engagement. Those involved in these vastly different cases both pursue repair and reparations through climate capitalist projects by reckoning with historical and present climate debts while constructing forward‐looking programs. As such, they chart the first steps towards reparative climate futures.
Cochlear implants are considered the gold standard in intervening on deafness and hearing loss. However, “success” is predicated upon routine and consistent use, which in turn is predicated on the ability to maintain devices. This essay considers what happens when use is partial and precarious and asks what happens when external implant processors become obsolete. Contributing to Science and Technology Studies scholarship on obsolescence and the binary between use and nonuse, I analyzes the ongoing aftermath of a central government program in India that provides children living below the poverty line with cochlear implants. Drawing on ethnography and interviews, the article analyzes how families struggle financially and logistically to maintain devices, resulting in cycles of partial use and precarious use. Ultimately, devices become obsolete, and families cannot afford compulsory upgrades. The state and corporations claim these families abandon the devices. In contrast to this claim, the article stresses that we must examine abandonment differently, by attending to how families are abandoned by the state and corporations. Arguing that obsolescence as a concept obscures relationality and functions apolitically, the concept of abandonment is instead put forward to analyze ruptures that occur when consistent and reliable biotechnology use is no longer possible.
Disability theory suggests that built environments stigmatize wheelchair users. This article explores how wheelchair users resist stigma by altering possibilities for action, or affordances, in their environments by “fooling” or “tinkering” with things. I focus on wheelchair users in the US region of Appalachia for three reasons. First, academic studies of stigma against either Appalachians or wheelchair users tend to exclude people belonging to both groups. Second, Appalachia's particular forms of tinkering can complement existing work on affordance management by disabled people. Finally, the spatial and technological distance between many Appalachian wheelchair users gives them insight into how rural settings influence the collective manipulation of affordances. Results indicate that Appalachian wheelchair users tinker with affordances in a variety of settings and with many kinds of collaborators. Although not politically motivated in most cases, their actions nonetheless expose intersecting ableism and classism in American built environments.
A critical exploration of today's global imperative to innovate, by champions, critics, and reformers of innovation.
Corporate executives, politicians, and school board leaders agree—Americans must innovate. Innovation experts fuel this demand with books and services that instruct aspiring innovators in best practices, personal habits, and workplace cultures for fostering innovation. But critics have begun to question the unceasing promotion of innovation, pointing out its gadget-centric shallowness, the lack of diversity among innovators, and the unequal distribution of innovation's burdens and rewards. Meanwhile, reformers work to make the training of innovators more inclusive and the outcomes of innovation more responsible. This book offers an overdue critical exploration of today's global imperative to innovate by bringing together innovation's champions, critics, and reformers in conversation.
The book presents an overview of innovator training, exploring the history, motivations, and philosophies of programs in private industry, universities, and government; offers a primer on critical innovation studies, with essays that historicize, contextualize, and problematize the drive to create innovators; and considers initiatives that seek to reform and reshape what it means to be an innovator.
The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from the MIT Libraries.
ContributorsErrol Arkilic, Catherine Ashcraft, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, W. Bernard Carlson, Lisa D. Cook, Humera Fasihuddin, Maryann Feldman, Erik Fisher, Benoît Godin, Jenn Gustetic, David Guston, Eric S. Hintz, Marie Stettler Kleine, Dutch MacDonald, Mickey McManus, Sebastian Pfotenhauer, Natalie Rusk, Andrew L. Russell, Lucinda M. Sanders, Brenda Trinidad, Lee Vinsel, Matthew Wisnioski
From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.
Most users want their Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube comments to be free of harassment and porn. Whether faced with “fake news” or livestreamed violence, “content moderators”-who censor or promote user-posted content-have never been more important. This is especially true when the tools that social media platforms use to curb trolling, ban hate speech, and censor pornography can also silence the speech you need to hear. In this revealing and nuanced exploration, award-winning sociologist and cultural observer Tarleton Gillespie provides an overview of current social media practices and explains the underlying rationales for how, when, and why these policies are enforced. In doing so, Gillespie highlights that content moderation receives too little public scrutiny even as it is shapes social norms and creates consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society. Based on interviews with content moderators, creators, and consumers, this accessible, timely book is a must-read for anyone who’s ever clicked “like” or “retweet.”.
Recently, media and communication researchers have shown an increasing interest in critical data studies and ways to utilize data for social progress. In this commentary, I highlight several useful contributions in the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP) report toward identifying key data justice issues, before suggesting extra focus on algorithmic discrimination and implicit bias. Following my assessment of the IPSP’s report, I emphasize the importance of two emerging media and communication areas – applied ontology and semantic technology – that impact internet users daily, yet receive limited attention from critical data researchers. I illustrate two examples to show how applied ontologies and semantic technologies impact social processes by engaging in the hierarchization of social relations and entities, a practice that will become more common as the Internet changes states towards a ‘smarter’ version of itself.
In this article, we introduce and demonstrate the concept-metaphor of broken data. In doing so, we advance critical discussions of digital data by accounting for how data might be in processes of decay, making, repair, re-making and growth, which are inextricable from the ongoing forms of creativity that stem from everyday contingencies and improvisatory human activity. We build and demonstrate our argument through three examples drawn from mundane everyday activity: the incompleteness, inaccuracy and dispersed nature of personal self-tracking data; the data cleaning and repair processes of Big Data analysis and how data can turn into noise and vice versa when they are transduced into sound within practices of music production and sound art. This, we argue is a necessary step for considering the meaning and implications of data as it is increasingly mobilised in ways that impact society and our everyday worlds.
This paper contends that systemic violence is fundamentally a classification problem. The interrogation of the production of racialized library subjects in relation to one another and in relation to political and social conditions may shed light on the intensely complex problems of racism in the United States today. I discuss the ways that sections of library classifications were constructed based on ideas about African Americans in relation to American social and political agendas. My claim is that the structures that were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are deeply embedded in our libraries and have participated in the naturalization of certain racialized assumptions and associations. In the 21st century we continue to maintain, apply, and refine a flawed structure. My aim is to provide a window into how epistemic violence affects American consciousness about race by revealing some of the ways that our library classifications have been woven together by a group of men who cited and informed one another and ultimately, organized and universalized American history. These classifications are structured around assertions about timeless and fixed national values constructed out of progressive conceptualizations of the nation and its citizenry. A reliance on racial exclusion was necessary for this grand narrative, and scientific theories and classifications provided legitimacy and fuel for racist programs. One of key ways that exclusion was legitimated and supported was through the application of evolutionary theory and principles. Social engineering, white supremacy, and conquest were justified and propelled by beliefs in the evolutionary superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is not by accident that these ideas became foundational to classificatory practice in libraries. In fact, Thomas Dousa has drawn attention to the intellectual climate in which late 19th century library classificationists worked - particularly, the theories and classifications of the sciences and nature as devised by Auguste Compte, Herbert Spencer, and Charles Darwin - and argues that these ideas and systems inspired the introduction of evolutionary principles into bibliographic classifications.[i] The present paper is in agreement with Dousa's claim and argues that such a conclusion carries critical implications for understanding libraries' classifications of race and ethnicity. Emphasis is placed is on the legacy of the classification of books about people of African descent as variously named and conceptualized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The last section of the paper examines the classifications as performatives to examine some of the processes by which racism has become systemic on library shelves. [i] Thomas M. Dousa, "Evolutionary Order in the Classification Theories of CA Cutter and EC Richardson: Its Nature and Limits." NASKO 2, no. 1 (2011): 76.
The importance of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is widely acknowledged in the academic literature, industry press and, increasingly, by professional institutes. Learning from previous projects systematically is central to improving building performance, resulting in a built environment that better fits the needs of clients, end users, wider society and the environment. The key role of architects in pushing forward this agenda has been recognized, however evidence suggests that take up of POE is low across the profession. Whilst research has investigated barriers to POE across the construction industry, very little has considered the unique perspective of architects. In-depth interviews with UK-based architects are presented to explore their experiences in relation to POE and their perspectives on its potential to be a standard part of architectural practice. The findings indicate that a considerable amount of practical work is being undertaken, but uncertainty over what constitutes POE means it is often excluded from the POE label – with significant implications for the development of a rigorous evidence base. An appetite is identified for more holistic evaluation measures that move beyond the current preoccupation with energy efficiency to consider other aspects of building performance, and thereby sustainability, in a wider value framework. © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
There is a growing interest in vocabularies as an important part of the infrastructure of library metadata on the Semantic Web. This article proposes that the framework of "maintenance, breakdown and repair", transposed from the field of Science and Technology Studies, can help illuminate and address vulnerabilities in this emerging infrastructure. In particular, Steven Jackson's concept of "broken world thinking" can shed light on the role of "maintainers" in sustainable innovation and infrastructure. By viewing vocabularies through the lens of broken world thinking, it becomes easier to see the gaps - and to see those who see the gaps - and build maintenance functions directly into tools, workflows, and services. It is hoped that this article will expand the conversation around bibliographic best practices in the context of the Web.
Bringing together leading researchers from geography, political science, sociology, public policy and technology studies, Disrupted Cities exposes the politics of well-known disruptions such as devastation of New Orleans in 2005, the global SARS outbreak in 2002-3, and the great power collapse in the North Eastern US in 2003. But the book also excavates the politics of more hidden disruptions: the clogging of city sewers with fat; the day-to-day infrastructural collapses which dominate urban life in much of the global south; the deliberate devastation of urban infrastructure by state militaries; and the ways in which alleged threats of infrastructural disruption have been used to radically reorganize cities as part of the 'war on terror'. Accessible, topical and state-of-the art, Disrupted Cities will be required reading for anyone interested in the intersections of technology, security and urban life as we plunge headlong into this quintessentially urban century. The book's blend of cutting-edge theory with visceral events means that it will be particularly useful for illuminating urban courses within geography, sociology, planning, anthropology, political science, public policy, architecture and technology studies.
Care is a slippery word. Any attempt to define it will be exceeded by its multivocality in everyday and scholarly use. In its enactment, care is both necessary to the fabric of biological and social existence and notorious for the problems that it raises when it is defined, legislated, measured, and evaluated. What care looks and feels like is both context-specific and perspective-dependent. Yet, this elusiveness does not mean that it lacks importance. In our engagements with the worlds that we study, construct, and inhabit, we cannot but care: care is an essential part of being a researcher and a citizen. To properly invite you into this Special Issue, then, we need to say something about what we mean when we write about care.
This paper introduces the method of Post Occupancy Monitoring as an evolution from Post Occupancy Evaluation of the built environment. The technique depends on the qualitative and quantitative aspirations of the stakeholders to apply methods resulting in closing the feedback loop of the built environment. Previous attempts are discussed such as the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Plan of Work for architects as well as the Soft Landings approach for handing over the building once commissioned. A gap in literature exists in the manner of continuously analyzing a building once it is handed over. Suitable incentives must be given to each of the stakeholders to participate in the process and learn from past initiatives. The paper suggests the need for energy monitoring, thermal comfort analysis and documenting user satisfaction as a basis for all existing building rating systems.
In what way is "care" a matter of "tinkering"? Rather than presenting care as a (preferably "warm") relation between human beings, the various contributions to the volume give the material world (usually cast as "cold") a prominent place in their analysis. Thus, this book does not continue to oppose care and technology, but contributes to rethinking both in such a way that they can be analysed together. Technology is not cast as a functional tool, easy to control it is shifting, changing, surprising and adaptable. In care practices all "things" are (and have to be) tinkered with persistently. Knowledge is fluid, too. Rather than a set of general rules, the knowledges (in the plural) relevant to care practices are as adaptable and in need of adaptation as the technologies, the bodies, the people, and the daily lives involved.
In this book, leading international scholars roll up their sleeves to investigate how culture and country characteristics permeate our households and our private lives. The book introduces novel frameworks for understanding why the household remains a bastion of traditional gender relations—even when employed full-time, women everywhere still do most of the work around the house, and poor women spend more time on housework than affluent women. Education systems, tax codes, labor laws, public polices, and cultural beliefs about motherhood and marriage all make a difference. Any accounting of “who does what” needs to consider the complicity of trade unions, state arrangements for children's schooling, and new cultural prescriptions for a happy marriage. With its cross-national perspective, this pioneering volume speaks not only to sociologists concerned with gender and family, but also to those interested in scholarship on states, public policy, culture, and social inequality.
In the past decade, South Africa's “miracle transition” has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the postapartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the non-payment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. This book shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the postapartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, the book examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape. It explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto—one of many efforts to curb the non-payment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle—and traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. The book follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa's transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world. The book examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa's political transformation.
Popular and scholarly histories of computer networking often focus on technical innovation and the social impact of those innovations. These histories are marked by a contradiction, namely, failing to explain the existence of the infrastructure that they must ultimately use as evidence for the success of innovation, and the conduit of its social impact. The story of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Agency's (DARPA's) Arpanet, and the role of both in the invention of the modern Internet, is a central archetype of this genre. Taking our lead from recent work in infrastructure and maintenance studies, we propose a methodological and ontological inversion of Internet historiography-centering our explanation around the infrastructure that is assumed but not explained in innovation-centric accounts. We do so by focusing on the U.S. Defense Communications Agency (DCA; now the Defense Information Systems Agency), which is traditionally cast, contra DARPA, as a conservative enemy of innovation. We explore its maintenance of the financial and administrative infrastructure necessary for the Arpanet to function as a contribution to broader histories of network infrastructure.
This article investigates the work of processors who curate and “clean” the data sets that researchers submit to data archives for archiving and further dissemination. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the data processing unit of a major US social science data archive, I investigate how these data processors work, under which status, and how they contribute to data sharing. This article presents two main results. First, it contributes to the study of invisible technicians in science by showing that the same procedures can make technical work invisible outside and visible inside the archive, to allow peer review and quality control. Second, this article contributes to the social study of scientific data sharing, by showing that the organization of data processing directly stems from the conception that the archive promotes of a valid data set—that is, a data set that must look “pristine” at the end of its processing. After critically interrogating this notion of pristineness, I show how it perpetuates a misleading conception of data as “raw” instead of acknowledging the important contribution of data processors to data sharing and social science.
This essay seeks to undermine the primacy of Vannevar Bush as an architect of digital culture by reimagining the story of national computing infrastructure through the framework of feminized care work. It argues that early forms of networked computational media were situated in collaborative spaces in which labor oriented around utilization, maintenance, and other forms of labor associated with domesticity were understood to be essential duties. This essay also tries not to focus exclusively on programmers, engineers, or designers as potential “mothers of invention.” Using theoretical frameworks from global feminists working on contemporary information and communication technologies, this essay argues that those who engage with the messiness of networks of relationships that constitute infrastructure should be acknowledged as critical in the history of computing, particularly to question myths of disintermediation that are so dominant in technological discourses. In considering recovered histories of women in computing, this essay examines the career of Mina Rees, who headed the mathematics department of the U. S. Office of Naval Research, as a way to rethink the origin stories of computer history.
The text is available here: https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01509617/document
Egypt’s irrigation infrastructure comprises a vast network of dams, canals, offtakes, and ditches, which direct water from the Nile throughout the Nile Valley and Delta to millions of farmers who rely on that water to cultivate their land. In this paper, I focus on the vital work of maintenance, which keeps this infrastructure functioning and the water flowing. Yet rather than taking maintenance as an inherent good, I look critically at what exactly is being maintained. I contrast two forms of canal maintenance: first, the work that Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation conducts, mostly during an annual maintenance period; second, the maintenance that farmers conduct on an everyday basis. State-led maintenance, I argue, is as much about reasserting state authority over the irrigation system as it is about fixing problems within the system. The unsung maintenance of irrigation ditches by farmers, on the other hand, is not only about cleaning ditches but also building communal relations among farmers that are key to the delivery of the water on which they depend. Focusing attention on the decision-making processes around maintenance reveals the variegated outcomes of this work and how it maintains not only the material but also social order.
This book explores the unintended consequences of compassion in the world of immigration politics. Miriam Ticktin focuses on France and its humanitarian immigration practices to argue that a politics based on care and protection can lead the state to view issues of immigration and asylum through a medical lens. Examining two "regimes of care"-humanitarianism and the movement to stop violence against women-Ticktin asks what it means to permit the sick and sexually violated to cross borders while the impoverished cannot? She demonstrates how in an inhospitable immigration climate, unusual pathologies can become the means to residency papers, making conditions like HIV, cancer, and select experiences of sexual violence into distinct advantages for would-be migrants. Ticktin's analysis also indicts the inequalities forged by global capitalism that drive people to migrate, and the state practices that criminalize the majority of undocumented migrants at the expense of care for the exceptional few.
Mignon Duffy uses a historical and comparative approach to examine and critique the entire twentieth-century history of paid care work-including health care, education and child care, and social servicesùdrawing on an in-depth analysis of U.S. Census data as well as a range of occupational histories. Making Care Count focuses on change and continuity in the social organization along with cultural construction of the labor of care and its relationship to gender, racial-ethnic, and class inequalities.
An account of how young people in Ghana's capital city adopt and adapt digital technology in the margins of the global economy.
The urban youth frequenting the Internet cafés of Accra, Ghana, who are decidedly not members of their country's elite, use the Internet largely as a way to orchestrate encounters across distance and amass foreign ties—activities once limited to the wealthy, university-educated classes. The Internet, accessed on second-hand computers (castoffs from the United States and Europe), has become for these youths a means of enacting a more cosmopolitan self. In Invisible Users, Jenna Burrell offers a richly observed account of how these Internet enthusiasts have adopted, and adapted to their own priorities, a technological system that was not designed with them in mind.
Burrell describes the material space of the urban Internet café and the virtual space of push and pull between young Ghanaians and the foreigners they encounter online; the region's famous 419 scam strategies and the rumors of “big gains” that fuel them; the influential role of churches and theories about how the supernatural operates through the network; and development rhetoric about digital technologies and the future viability of African Internet cafés in the region.
Burrell, integrating concepts from science and technology studies and African studies with empirical findings from her own field work in Ghana, captures the interpretive flexibility of technology by users in the margins but also highlights how their invisibility puts limits on their full inclusion into a global network society.
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction estimates that globally from 2000 to 2012 disasters killed 1.2 million people, affected 2.9 billion others, and claimed $1.7 trillion dollars in material damage. The United States has moved into a “new normal” of frequent, billion-dollar hurricanes, eight of the ten costliest occurring since 2004. The Department of Defense warns that climate change threatens national security and will cause global political instability as a result of “prolonged drought and flooding … food shortages, desertification, population dislocation and mass migration, and sea level rise.” Not a week goes by without news of a new technological “accident,” and the malignant long-term impacts of chemicals, radiation, plastics, petroleum—the material markers of technological society—on our bodies, our communities, and our planet.
Historians of technology and science—working together with STS colleagues—have powerful tools to apply toward the work of reducing disaster losses globally in the twenty-first century. Disaster research is in fact a wildly interdisciplinary intellectual ground, comprised of the humanities and social sciences, and converging frequently with more practice-focused communities in city planning, emergency management, public health, public policy, engineering, and the natural and physical sciences. Disasters cut across realms of knowledge and practice in an unparalleled way.
Historians of technology have a very specific role to play in offering longitudinal perspective—charting hazards and risks, technical epistemologies and languages, and disasters themselves across historical time. Historical research is also highly attuned to comparative analysis, discovering and connecting expert and organizational cultures across disciplinary, organizational, and national boundaries. These skills are useful as we try to understand the ways that hazards are created, risks are calculated, and policies of disaster management are enacted. Disasters themselves are scrutinized by historians for the ways they are used to frame and reframe arguments over nature, technology, corporate power, and the role of the modern state in protecting citizens. And, of course, historians of technology are particularly well-poised to open the black box of technology, demonstrating the material and also the political mechanisms of technical knowledge and artifacts. Many from the history of technology community have worked influentially in this area for years. But the need for even more historical understanding is at this time acute. A poverty of disaster memory is convenient for some, but a tragedy for most. And if we do not continue to fill this void of knowledge, others will do it for us without the perspectives offered by the long view of history, namely that risk-taking is no accident and disasters are never truly unexpected.
The relevance of disaster research is clear in the pages of Technology and Culture since September 11, and even more visible in events such as the 2011 co-located (HSS, SHOT, 4S) plenary session on “Dealing with Disasters,” with Gabrielle Hecht, Hugh Gusterson, and Spencer Weart. At the 2012 SHOT annual meeting, the Prometheans Special Interest Group brought together seventeen papers around the topic of “Historical and Contemporary Studies of Disasters.” The 4S meeting that same year included four linked panels dedicated to the topic of Fukushima (among many other disaster-themed sessions). This year, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists of science and technology played a central role in the fiftieth anniversary of the highly influential Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. And an interdisciplinary Disaster-STS research portal is now live on the web (http://disaster-sts-network.org/). Disaster research is emerging as a vigorous subfield in the larger hybrid of techno-scientific inquiry—overlapping productively with environmental, public health, and industrial history.
If we believe (as I do) that history provides the foregrounding for effective public policy in nuclear regulation, environmental pollution, sustainable land use, climate change, and emergency management, then it is a mistake for us to sit by the phone anticipating a senator’s call asking for advice about the next disaster. Waiting for relevant disaster research to organically “find its way” into public discourse is a failure of professional responsibility, and of imagination. Historians can participate in disaster reduction interventions at levels that promise tremendous impact—through scholarship first, in our roles as educators (most of us teach future technical and...
In this chapter from the forthcoming Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online (Noble and Tynes, Eds., 2016), I introduce both the concept of commercial content moderation (CCM) work and workers, as well as the ways in which this unseen work affects how users experience the Internet of social media and user-generated content (UGC). I tie it to issues of race and gender by describing specific cases of viral videos that transgressed norms and by providing examples from my interviews with CCM workers. The interventions of CCM workers on behalf of the platforms for which they labor directly contradict myths of the Internet as a site for free, unmediated expression, and highlight the complexities of how and why racist, homophobic, violent, and sexist content exists, and persists, in a social media landscape that often purports to disallow it.
Responding to the call by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa for Science and Technology Studies to take up ‘matters of care’, this article cautions against equating care with positive feelings and, in contrast, argues for the importance of grappling with the non-innocent histories in which the politics of care already circulates, particularly in transnational couplings of feminism and health. The article highlights these histories by tracing multiple versions of the politics of care in a select set of feminist engagements with the pap smear and cervical cancer. Drawing on postcolonial and indigenous feminist commitments, as well as amplifying Donna Haraway’s call to ‘stay with the trouble’, the article seeks to disturb hegemonic histories and arrangements of race, colonialism, and political economy, while simultaneously valuing divergent multi-local itineraries as relevant to technoscientific matters of care. This call for a politics of ‘unsettling’ care strives to stir up and put into motion what is sedimented, while embracing the generativity of discomfort, critique, and non-innocence.
DIVIn Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons./div
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open access : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01186728
Drawing on an ethnographic study of the installation and maintenance of Paris subway wayfinding system, this article attempts to discuss and specify previous claims that highlight stability and immutability as crucial aspects of material ordering processes. Though in designers’ productions (such as guidelines or graphic manuals), subway signs have been standardized and their consistency has been invested in to stabilize riders’ environment, they appear as fragile and transforming entities in the hands of maintenance workers. These two situated accounts are neither opposite nor paradoxical: they enact different versions of subway signs, the stabilization of which goes through the acknowledgment of their vulnerability. Practices that deal with material fragility are at the center of what we propose, following Annemarie Mol and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, to term a care of things. Foregrounding such a care of things is a way to surface a largely overlooked dimension of material ordering and to renew how maintainability issues are generally tackled.
What is good care? In this innovative and compelling book, Annemarie Mol argues that good care has little to do with 'patient choice' and, therefore, creating more opportunities for patient choice will not improve health care. Although it is possible to treat people who seek professional help as customers or citizens, Mol argues that this undermines ways of thinking and acting crucial to health care. Illustrating the discussion with examples from diabetes clinics and diabetes self care, the book presents the 'logic of care' in a step by step contrast with the 'logic of choice'. She concludes that good care is not a matter of making well argued individual choices but is something that grows out of collaborative and continuing attempts to attune knowledge and technologies to diseased bodies and complex lives. Mol does not criticise the practices she encountered in her field work as messy or ad hoc, but makes explicit what it is that motivates them: an intriguing combination of adaptability and perseverance. The Logic of Care: Health and the problem of patient choice is crucial reading for all those interested in the theory and practice of care, including sociologists, anthropologists and health care professionals. It will also speak to policymakers and become a valuable source of inspiration for patient activists.
This article considers the possibility that small acts of urban care, maintenance and cleaning might make for a good city. This might seem a slim possibility, given the vast sociology of hopelessness to which the contemporary city is home. But it can also be argued that a politics, and a sociology, of hope are best looked for not in big picture or utopian thinking but in the practical instances of everyday care and kindness that are as much a part of the urban everyday as anxiety, insecurity and damage. We explore this possibility through a critical assessment of Nigel Thrift’s recent writings on urban repair, drawing (but not reporting) on our own research with street cleaners and outreach workers tasked to look out for the rough sleeping homeless.
This astonishing book presents a distinctive approach to the politics of everyday life. Ranging across a variety of spaces in which politics and the political unfold, it questions what is meant by perception, representation and practice, with the aim of valuing the fugitive practices that exist on the margins of the known. It revolves around three key functions. It: Introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audience. Provides the basis for an experimental rather than a representational approach to the social sciences and humanities. Begins the task of constructing a different kind of political genre. A groundbreaking and comprehensive introduction to this key topic, Thrift's outstanding work brings together further writings from a body of work that has come to be known as non-representational theory. This noteworthy book makes a significant contribution to the literature in this area and is essential reading for researchers and postgraduates in the fields of social theory, sociology, geography, anthropology and cultural studies.
The concept of reproductive labor is central to an analysis of gender inequality, including understanding the devaluation of cleaning, cooking, child care, and other “women's work” in the paid labor force. This article presents historical census data that detail transformations of paid reproductive labor during the twentieth century. Changes in the organization of cooking and cleaning tasks in the paid labor market have led to shifts in the demographics of workers engaged in these tasks. As the context for cleaning and cooking work shifted from the dominance of private household servants to include more institutional forms, the gender balance of this reproductive labor workforce has been transformed, while racial-ethnic hierarchies have remained entrenched. This article highlights the challenges to understanding occupational segregation and the devaluation of reproductive labor in a way that analyzes gender and race-ethnicity in an intersectional way and integrates cultural and structural explanations of occupational degradation.
This article argues that changes in the organization of social reproduction, defined to include the activities, attitudes, behaviors, emotions, responsibilities, and relationships involved in maintaining daily life, can explain historical differences in women's political self-organization. Examining the Progressive period, the 1930s, and the 1960s and 1970s, the authors suggest that the conditions of social reproduction provide the organizational resources for and legitimation of women's collective action.
R E C E N T SCHO L A R S H I P on African American, Latina, Asian American, and Native American women reveals the complex interaction of race and gender oppression in their lives. These studies expose the inadequacy of additive models that treat gender and race as separate and discrete systems of hierarchy (Collins 1986; King 1988; Brown 1989). In an additive model, white women are viewed solely in terms of gender, while women of color are thought to be "doubly" subordinated by the cumulative effects of gender plus race. Yet achieving a more adequate framework, one that captures the interlocking, interactive nature of these systems, has been extraordinarily difficult. Historically, race and gender have developed as separate topics of inquiry, each with its own literature and concepts. Thus features of social life considered central in understanding one system have been overlooked in analyses of the other. One domain that has been explored extensively in analyses of gender but ignored in studies of race is social reproduction. The term social reproduction is used by feminist scholars to refer to the array of activities and relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and intergenerationally. Reproductive labor includes activities such as purchasing household goods, preparing and serving food, laundering and repairing clothing, maintaining furnishings and appliances, socializing children, providing care and emotional support for adults, and maintaining kin and community ties. Work on this project was made possible by a Title F leave from the State University of New York at Binghamton and a visiting scholar appointment at the Murray Research Center at Radcliffe College. Discussions with Elsa Barkley Brown, Gary Glenn, Carole Turbin, and Barrie Thorne contributed immeasurably to the ideas developed here. My thanks to Joyce Chinen for directing me to archival materials in Hawaii. I am also grateful to members of the Women and Work Group and to Norma Alarcon, Gary Dymski, Antonia Glenn, Margaret Guilette, Terence Hopkins, Eileen McDonagh, JoAnne Preston, Mary Ryan, and four anonymous Signs reviewers for their suggestions.