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Infrastructures, Maintenance and Care - II

Thu, September 5, 9:45 to 11:15am, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Five, Grand Ballroom A

Abstract

Recent work on maintenance, repair and care has helped to reconsider several traditional STS issues, notably by moving away from a focus on innovation processes and re-examining the question of material agency through the lens of fragility. In this panel, we aim to further this empirical and analytical conversation, and explore what the study of maintenance and care practices can contribute to our understanding of infrastructures.
It is organized in two symmetrical parts. The first one is dedicated to the maintenance and care of infrastructures. Examining the different operations that allow infrastructures to last, and the distribution of these operations among actors of different kinds, allows us to take a new look at these objects. It notably helps to go beyond the figures of breakdown and collapse, which are regularly called upon to study infrastructures, and discover largely unnoticed aspects of their modes of existence.
The second part will focus on maintenance and care infrastructures. Whether in terms of laws, standards, but also instruments and organizations, maintenance and care rely on a variety of infrastructures that directly configure the forms it can take and include or exclude the people who can be involved in it. Questioning these infrastructures of maintenance invites not to reduce maintenance practices to craftsmanship, and to prevent any form of care from being romanticized, by remaining attentive to the variety of the practical conditions in which maintenance and care may be performed, and the debates, even controversies, to which they are subjected.

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