Sensing the Liveliness of Things and the Fragility of Life: Bringing Care and Maintenance Together II

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

In 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote the “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” where she associated mundane practices of maintenance (both at home and at work) with the broader area of care. Although both activities, she explained, are vital in the daily production, continuation, preservation of life, maintenance and care have been typically characterized as unworthy and merely reproductive activities carried out by women and low-paid workers. Recently, several STS scholars have demonstrated that investigating care (Mol, Murphy, Pols, Puig de la Bellacasa) and maintenance and repair (Cállen and Criado, Denis and Pontille, Dominguez Rubio, Jackson, Rosner, Ureta) could help decenter traditional issues in STS, such as agency, knowledge production, or the innovation and performativity of sociomaterial orders, as well as open up new ways to discuss politics and ethics. Though some of these works have explicitly discussed the relationships between care and maintenance, the encounters are still timid, and the discussion exploratory. We would like to use this open panel as a meeting point for those two conversations, and a way of teasing out the larger ethical, political and methodological consequences that the bringing together of the reflections on care, repair and maintenance could have for the renewal of STS sensibilities. To do so, we invite contributions across different domains such as arts, architecture, urban studies, media studies, organization studies, and of course STS.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Fernando Dominguez, NYU

Individual Presentations

• Valuable Buildings, Disabled People: Tinkering with Maintenance and Care in Situations of Socio-Material Oppression - Michal Synek, Masaryk University / Charles University

• Re-Pairing Bodies, Users and Devices - Peter Fuzesi, Lancaster University

• Art under Nanotechnological Care: Bridging Conservation and Scientific Practices - Grace Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

• Configuring Repair: The Case of the MV Veteran - Donny Persaud, Memorial University Of Newfoundland

• The Germ and the Thaw: Maintenance, Performance, and Care in Seed Banking - Xan Chacko, University of California, Davis