Repair Work Ethnographies

Repair Work Ethnographies PDF Author: Ignaz Strebel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811321108
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book Here

Book Description
This pioneering book homes in on repair as an everyday practice. Bringing together exemplary ethnographies of repair work around the world, it examines the politics of repair, its work settings and intricate networks, in and across a wide range of situations, lay and professional. The book evidences the topical relevance of situated inquiry into breakdown, repair, and maintenance for engaging with the contemporary world more broadly. Airplanes and artworks, bicycles and buildings, cars and computers, medical devices and mobile phones, as virtually any commodity, infrastructure or technical artifact, have in common their occasional breakdown, if not inbuilt obsolescence. Hence the point and purpose of closely examining how and when they are fixed.

Repair Work Ethnographies

Repair Work Ethnographies PDF Author: Ignaz Strebel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811321108
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book Here

Book Description
This pioneering book homes in on repair as an everyday practice. Bringing together exemplary ethnographies of repair work around the world, it examines the politics of repair, its work settings and intricate networks, in and across a wide range of situations, lay and professional. The book evidences the topical relevance of situated inquiry into breakdown, repair, and maintenance for engaging with the contemporary world more broadly. Airplanes and artworks, bicycles and buildings, cars and computers, medical devices and mobile phones, as virtually any commodity, infrastructure or technical artifact, have in common their occasional breakdown, if not inbuilt obsolescence. Hence the point and purpose of closely examining how and when they are fixed.

Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough

Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough PDF Author: Francisco Martínez
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789203325
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book Here

Book Description
Exploring some of the ways in which repair practices and perceptions of brokenness vary culturally, Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough argues that repair is both a process and also a consequence which is sought out—an attempt to extend the life of things as well as an answer to failures, gaps, wrongdoings, and leftovers. This volume develops an open-ended combination of empirical and theoretical questions including: What does it mean to claim that something is broken? At what point is something broken repairable? What are the social relationships that take place around repair? And how much tolerance for failure do our societies have?

Repairing Infrastructures

Repairing Infrastructures PDF Author: Christopher R. Henke
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262360683
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book Here

Book Description
An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Infrastructures--communication, food, transportation, energy, and information--are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them.

Repairing Infrastructures

Repairing Infrastructures PDF Author: Christopher R. Henke
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262539705
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book Here

Book Description
An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Infrastructures—communication, food, transportation, energy, and information—are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them. Repair can encompass not only the kind of work we most commonly associate with the term but also any set of practices aimed at restoring a sense of normalcy or credibility to the places and institutions we inhabit in everyday life. From cases as diverse as the repair of building systems on a university campus, a conflict over retrofitting a bridge while protecting murals painted on it, and the global challenge posed by climate change, Henke and Sims assemble a range of examples to illustrate key conceptual points about the role of repair. They show that repair is an essential if often overlooked aspect of understanding the broader impact and politics of infrastructures. Understanding repair helps us better understand infrastructures and the scope of their influence on our lives.

Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology

Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology PDF Author: Mark Thomas Young
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040024963
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
What can we learn about the nature of technology by studying practices of maintenance and repair? This volume addresses this question by bringing together scholarship from philosophers of technology working at the forefront of this emerging and exciting topic. The chapters in this volume explore how attending to maintenance and repair can challenge and complement existing ways of thinking about technology focused on use and design and introduce new philosophical perspectives on the relationship between technology, time and human practice. They examine the significance of maintenance and repair practices at different scales in relation to a diverse range of philosophical traditions and a wide variety of technologies, from urban infrastructure such as bridges and buildings to data technologies such as servers and software systems. Together, the contributions highlight common themes in the philosophical study of maintenance, including the role of skill, the significance of social values and the potential of these practices to transform the technologies to which they are applied. By reflecting on the different ways in which we keep technologies going, from the devices we use in our homes to the large technical systems which surround us, this volume reveals the philosophical significance of practices of maintenance, not only as a source of new insights but also as a resource for enriching our understanding of a variety of existing topics in philosophy. Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of technology, philosophy of engineering and science & technology studies. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Fixing Motorcycles in Post-Repair Societies

Fixing Motorcycles in Post-Repair Societies PDF Author: Gabriel Jderu
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800738781
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Get Book Here

Book Description
Most social science studies on automobility have focused on the production, usage, identity construction and aesthetic improvements of personal means of transportation. What happens if we shift the focus to the labour, knowledge and social relations that go into the unavoidable moments of maintenance and repair? Taking motorcycling in Romania as an ethnographic entry point, this book documents how bikers handle the inevitable moments of malfunction and breakdown. Using both mobile and sedentary research methods, the book describes the joys and troubles experienced by amateur mechanics, professional mechanics and untechnical men and women when fixing bikes.

Building Trust, Situating Repair

Building Trust, Situating Repair PDF Author: James Merron
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 3906927539
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 125

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nature conservation is often framed as an ecological problem in need of repair. With both material and discursive dimensions, repairing things involves repairing people's orientation to those things. As such, nature conservation can be understood as a negotiation between different orientations to ecological problems. This publication seeks to understand the negotiation through trust, the analysis of which situates repair in a particular setting. Empirically, the book is structured around an encounter that unfolded over the course of a single day between white commercial farmers and experts belonging to various government departments, universities and an NGO working in a South African nature reserve. By moving through the situation se-quence-by-sequence the author captures the relationship between trust and repair vis-à-vis the material forces that structured the situation, and the discursive methods that actors used to repair a degraded ecology. Originally from Makhanda (South Africa), James Merron grew up in Botswana and the United States. After his Master's degree, he lectured at Stellenbosch University in 2012. By 2023, he earned a PhD and then post-doc position at the University of Basel. He is associated with the Centre for African Studies Basel (Switzerland) and his work is based on exploring the relationship between science, technology and society.

Ethnographies and Health

Ethnographies and Health PDF Author: Emma Garnett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319893963
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
This edited collection explores the multiple ways in which ethnography and health emerge and take form through the research process. There is now a plethora of disciplinary engagements with ethnography around the topic of health, including anthropology, sociology, geography, science and technology studies, and in health care professions such as nursing and occupational therapy. This dynamic and evolving landscape means ethnography and health are entangled in new and different ways, providing a timely opportunity to explore what these entanglements do and affect in the social production of knowledge. Rather than discussing the strengths (and limitations) of ethnography for engaging with health, the book asks: what does ethnography enable, make visible and possible for knowing and doing health in contemporary research settings and beyond?

Large Housing Estates under Socialism

Large Housing Estates under Socialism PDF Author: Barbara Engel
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839467829
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Harnessing large urban housing estates in former socialist countries as a resource for the future housing supply requires innovative and practicable strategies and concepts. What are the challenges to be overcome? How can the often mono-structural estates be altered, and how can spatial and cultural identities be reinforced? Which role does the community play in these former socialist neighborhoods? The contributors to this volume present perspectives from different disciplines, both in academia and practice. The exchange of international experiences creates the base for further debate and learning and provides insight into the multiplicity of challenges and approaches today.

Communication Maintenance in Longue Durée

Communication Maintenance in Longue Durée PDF Author: Gabriele Balbi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104014960X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume focuses on the politics, economics, technologies, uses, and cultures of maintenance of different forms of communication over long time or in Longue Durée. Throughout the chapters, contributors from a wide range of fields explore transversal and trans-temporal issues of communication maintenance. Among these are the struggles to keep communication infrastructures functioning, the hidden work of maintenance done by both experts and non-experts such as everyday users, the political significance of maintaining communications (or not maintaining them), and the different habits and significance of maintenance in different times and world regions. The forms of communication covered include broadcasting, telecommunications such as the telegraph and telephone, digital and popular media as computers and mobile phones, mostly forgotten media like pneumatic tubes, transportation infrastructures, maps as used as tools to politically control land, the clock as a medium and a material artifact, and many more. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of communication and media studies, the history of science and technology, general history, geography, maintenance studies, and other related disciplines. The Introduction, Chapter 5 and 8 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.