Maintenance and its knowledges I

Abstract

In recent years, a series of maintenance studies have uncovered a world of sociotechnical practices that had remained unexplored by traditional STS such as research around innovation, breakdowns or disasters. Mostly repetitive and unheroic, these practices are dedicated to making things last rather than creating novelty or simply putting damaged objects ‘back in order’. In these approaches, maintenance has been described in terms of an ethics of care, in which material entanglements, thoughtful improvisations and embodied adjustments are essential features.

This panel aims at complementing these investigations by focusing on the different forms of knowledge—e.g. theories, standards, ‘best practices’, oral stories, tacit skills—, that emerge for, around, and as maintenance. These knowledges are plural and sometimes antagonistic in how they shape the means and rules to take care of objects, and how they define the ‘whatness’ of the things that are maintained. We would like to explore and analyze their relationships, and understand the conditions of their articulation, separation, or confrontation.

Beyond a generic use of the notion of ‘knowledge’, submissions are invited to pay particular attention to the specific forms of knowledge that emerge at various empirical settings. Furthermore, if different forms of knowledge may work as resources or constraints during interventions, maintenance situations can also be investigated as sites and moments of knowledge generation. We expect that documenting and understanding the dynamics of these processes will be central to some of the proposals.

Chair

• David Pontille, CNRS

Individual Presentations

• Getting to know and learning to care for microalgae in an experimental wastewater treatment system - Mandy de Wilde, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Fenna Smits, University of Amsterdam

• Maintaining an Aboriginal Honeybee Population in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian Region - Tanya Richardson, Wilfrid Laurier University; Emilia Keil, Prokopovych Institute of Beekeeping, Academy of Agrarian Sciences of Ukraine; Alla Kizman, Prokopovych Institute of Beekeeping, Academy of Agrarian Sciences of Ukraine; Stepan Kerek, Prokopovych Institute of Beekeeping, Academy of Agrarian Sciences of Ukraine; Viktor Papp, Prokopovych Institute of Beekeeping, Academy of Agrarian Sciences of Ukraine; Ivan Mertsyn, Prokopovych Institute of Beekeeping, Academy of Agrarian Sciences of Ukraine

• "My store is a laboratory" - Nicolas Nova, Geneva School of Art and Design

• Maintenance in Time: Managing Time in Repair and Maintenance Work - Alex Reiss Sorokin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Software as an Object of Shared Maintenance Knowledge - Mace Ojala, IT University of Copenhagen; Marisa Leavitt Cohn, IT University Copenhagen

Session Organizers

• Jérôme Denis, CSI - MINES ParisTech

• Fernando Dominguez, UC San Diego

• David Pontille, CNRS