Re-Pairing Bodies, Users and Devices

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

Abstract

My presentation explores how recent scholarship on care, repair, and maintenance can help to re-orientate and de-center the figures of user and use, and the socio-material orders they enact.
I focus on how maintenance and repair are positioned as a technological practice at the intersection of dual boundaries: On the one hand, practices of repair are distinguished from those of design and use. And whilst notions of design and use are used to describe “normal” technological practices, breakdown, repair and maintenance are seen as exceptions, and the work that goes into keeping things in a working condition/order have a tendency to disappear (Strauss and Star, Jackson). On the other, everyday parlance and professional and policy discourses and practices maintain a distinction between care for living bodies and the maintenance and repair of inanimate objects.

What happens, then, to repair and maintenance in the context of health-care? How is the meaning and practice of this technological work transformed at a site, where the user of technology is identified as needing care?
I draw on ethnographic data on service workers who deliver personalised assistive communication systems for people with extensive impairments who could be easily identified as cyborgs. This data gives important clues to unsettle pervasive notions of use and user, which assume that the user is non-disabled and not in need of care.

In a case where both the user and technology are cared for, repair and maintenance undergo important shifts: Here I focus on how, personalization necessitates a modular product ecology, personalized communication systems have to be continuously calibrated, re-assembled customised and transformed. This, then, troubles the established distinction between design and repair. Far from becoming peripheral or invisible, repair remain central and salient features of technological practice. Further, recognizing the changing needs and conditions of users invites an ongoing tinkering and reconfiguration of systems where repair moves beyond fixing things and becomes a site of transformation. Due to the constant reconfiguration through repair, assistive communication systems exist as vulnerable (Denis and Pontille) or unstable and open entities.

Author

• Peter Fuzesi, Lancaster University