Why do maintenance and repair matter?

Abstract

This chapter introduces the recent works that compose what the author proposes to call “maintenance and repair studies.” It identifies two of their main contributions to ANT. Because they take place in a continuum between regular use and outright failure, maintenance and repair activities first invite to reconsider the role usually attributed to breakdown in the study of technologies. Maintenance and repair studies investigate a wide range of states in which objects, technologies and infrastructures can be found throughout their lives. Accordingly, some of these works show that failures and breakdown are not necessarily clearly and collectively identifiable events. Rather, as well as stability and order itself, they are relational phenomena that emerge from specific maintenance practices. Second, maintenance and repair studies decentre the way materiality is generally discussed in social sciences. Whilst most ANT-inspired works have typically focused on solidity, resistance and permanence to problematise objects’ agency, detailed examinations of maintenance and repair practices put material fragility and diversity to the fore. Activities such as mending, restoring, upkeep, fixing or preserving offer manifold occasions to fathom the material ecology that is hidden when objects are apprehended as crystallised artefacts.

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