Repairing Technology - Fixing Society?

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Repairing Technology - Fixing Society?

Veranstalter
Thomas Hoppenheit, Stefan Krebs and Rebecca Mossop (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History)
Veranstaltungsort
Halle des poches à fonte
Gefördert durch
FNR
PLZ
L-4362
Ort
Esch-Belval
Land
Luxembourg
Findet statt
In Präsenz
Vom - Bis
13.10.2022 - 14.10.2022
Website
https://repair.uni.lu
Von
Stefan Krebs, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), University of Luxembourg

The closing conference is part of our FNR-funded REPAIR project that investigates the maintenance practices of the Luxembourg telephone network, continuity and change in local repair opportunities for consumer objects, and the role and influence of do-it-yourself cultures on repair practices.

Repairing Technology - Fixing Society?

Failures and breakdowns constitute an important element in the fundamental relationship between users and technology, and maintenance and repair are fundamental practices in everyday life. Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift (2007) highlighted that “repair and maintenance are not incidental activities. In many ways, they are the engine room of modern economies and societies”. However, we still know very little about the actual developments of repair practices in the past and today. In his essay “Rethinking repair”, Steven Jackson (2014) therefore called for what he coined “broken world thinking”. He argues that we should take “erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points” when we want to study consumption and use. Broken world thinking is an exercise in “infrastructural inversion”, a reversal of fore- and background to better understand the hidden, but fundamental practices of repair that keep our modern technical world running. Despite the prevailing master narrative that the advent of the consumer society caused a decline in repair, it has not become obsolete in modern consumer societies but has remained integral to their economic functioning.

Current repair advocates emphasise the sustainability of repair. We are interested in historical and contemporary discourses and critical reflections about the assumed relationship between maintenance, repair and (more) sustainable consumption. By discussing the epistemology, sociology, politics, economics, and histories of maintenance and repair, we would like to contribute to the growing field of repair studies. We are interested in repair in all its forms: from small objects to large technical systems, from the global North to the global South. The conference is open to various interdisciplinary approaches.

Programm

Thursday, 13 October
09.15 Arrival of participants

09.45 Welcome by Stefan Krebs (University of Luxembourg, PI REPAIR)

10.00 Section 1: Repairing Infrastructures
Chair: Stefan Krebs

- Maintenance and Political Economy: Fixing Submarine Cables to Reinvent Transatlantic Capitalism, Jacob Ward (Maastricht University)

- Communicating Smoothly: Maintaining the Luxembourg Telephone Network, Rebecca Mossop (University of Luxembourg)

11.00 Coffee break

11.30 Section 1 (continued): Repairing Infrastructures

- Repairing "Smart" Infrastructures: Sustainability Orientations in Tension Between Infrastructuring Publics, Madison Snider (University of Washington)

- Iron Gates: The Study on Maintenance of the Hydro and Navigation System, Tijana Rupcic (Central European University, Vienna)

12.30 Lunch break

13.30 Visit Blast Furnace A

14.30 Section 2: Repair Ethnographies
Chair: Thomas Hoppenheit

- Tinkering and Innovation in Medicine: Ethnographic Experiments for Studying Repair and Maintenance, Anna Harris (Maastricht University)

- Materialize the Thought: the Production of Research Zines as a Tool in Studying Repair and Maintenance, Anaïs Bloch (Geneva University of Art and Design)

15.30 Coffee break

16.30 Section 2 (continued): Repair Ethnographies

- Maintaining Shoes/Feet, Chris Hesselbein (Politecnico di Milano)

- Repair Work as Craft and Career: Insights from the Apprenticeship Journey in Classic Car Restoration, Ödül Bozkurt (University of Sussex Business School)

17.15-18.15h Keynote Christopher Henke (Colgate University): Repair, Maintenance, and Infrastructure Studies: The Promise (and Perils?) of an “Emerging Field”

18.30-19.15h Reception

Friday, 14 October
09.00 Section 3: Repairing Objects
Chair: Rebecca Mossop

- The Politics of Everyday Repair Opportunities, Thomas Hoppenheit (University of Luxembourg)

- Wasted Time / The Emergence of a Throwaway Culture Using the Example of Clocks and Watches, Thomas Schütz (Stuttgart University)

- Modest Technology: Repairing Radio Sets in Socialist China, Yingchuan Yang (Columbia University)

10.30 Coffee break

11.00 Section 4: Repairing Hard- and Software
Chair: Stefan Krebs

- The Broken World of Refugee Apps? Towards Sustainability of Mobile Applications, Olga Usachova (University of Padova)

- Repair and Democratisation of Distance Learning During Covid-19, Abdallah Zouhairi (University Hassan II. Casablanca)

12.00 Lunch break

13.00 Section 4 (continued): Repairing Hard- and Software

- Maintenance and Repair as Innovation? Software Systems and the Case of Climate Models, Matthias Heymann (Aarhus University)

- Project ATENA: Born to be Outmoded. Emotions and the Technopolitical Construction of Obsolescence in the History of Computing, Ginevra Sanvitale (Eindhoven University of Technology)

14.00 Closing remarks Stefan Krebs

Kontakt

Vanessa Napolitano, vanessa.napolitano@uni.lu

https://repair.uni.lu