Imagining Practices of Crip Maintenance through the Elevator

• In Event: Making Disability: Disability Culture, Design, and STS

Abstract

This presentation considers the relationship between Disability Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS) by analyzing how scholars in each think about maintenance. Over the past five-to-ten years, STS scholars have turned their focus toward the study of maintenance with scholars like Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell, among others, arguing that the study of innovation can only take us so far in understanding the relationship between society and technology (Russell and Vinsel 2016). In their seminal article “Hail the Maintainers,” they asked the question: Is there a better way to characterize this relationship? Ultimately, they suggested that looking at maintenance as opposed to innovation would be a more useful way to understand the relationships between technology and society. While maintenance has only recently come under investigation in STS, for other academic disciplines like Disability Studies, maintenance has long been a critical point of investigation (Ott 2002; Williamson 2012). In this presentation, I ask how STS has been able to bypass practices of maintenance for so long when it has been addressed in Disability Studies for many years. To better understand this and similar questions, I put these two areas of study and their attention to maintenance in conversation by examining elevator maintenance with the Critical Design Lab. Because elevators are simultaneously “platforms that can move people and objects up and down” as well as spaces for access that require various forms of maintenance, elevators serve as an ideal case study to explore how both Disability Studies and STS think about maintenance and its attendant characteristics (Upton 2014).


Cited:

Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, "Hail the maintainers," Aeon, April 7, 2016, accessed October 25, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more

Ott, Katherine, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm. Artificial parts, practical lives: modern histories of prosthetics. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2002.

Russell, Andrew, and Lee Vinsel. "Hail the Maintainers." Aeon, April 7, 2016. Accessed January 20, 2019. https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more.

Upton, Emily. "Who Invented the Elevator?" Gizmodo. May 02, 2014. Accessed January 24, 2019. https://gizmodo.com/who-invented-the-elevator-1570745196.

Williamson, Bess. "Electric Moms and Quad Drivers: People with Disabilities Buying, Making, and Using Technology in Postwar America." American Studies 52, no. 1 (2012): 5-30.

Author

• Leah Samples, University of Pennsylvania