Maintainers I: 2016

April 7-9, 2016 | Hoboken, NJ

Scott Knowles, Drexel University
“Maintenance Deferred: Slow Disaster and the Politics of Infrastructural Decay” [READ PAPER]
Zachary Pirtle, NASA
“What Do Maintainers Know and How Do They Know It?: Insights from Exploration Systems Development”
Lara Houston, Cornell University
“Unsettled repair tools: The death of the J.A.F. Box” [READ PAPER]
Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina
“An Ethics of Care for Infrastructural Repair” [READ PAPER]

Ruth Schwartz Cowan, University of Pennsylvania
“Maintaining Gender with Technology”

Ann Greene, University of Pennsylvania
“Success as ‘Failure’: Historians, Engineers, and Maintaining the Erie Canal” [READ PAPER]
Deepak Malghan, Indian Institute of Management
“Two Cultures and the Efficiency Revolution: The Connected Histories of Innovation and Maintenance”
John Laurence Busch, Independent Scholar
“Maintaining Innovators or Innovating Maintainers?: Revolutionaries vs. Reactionaries in the 19th Century Maritime World” [READ PAPER]
Nicholas O’Brien, Stevens Institute of Technology
“The Trolley”

Ellen Foster, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
“Systems of Maintenance: Feminist Theory and Method” [READ PAPER]
Juris Milestone, Temple University
“Anthropologist as Tribologist” [READ PAPER]
Padraig Murphy, Dublin City University
“Reprising the Third Way: a Middling Proposal” [READ PAPER]
Matt Thomas, Kirkwood Community College
“Against Innovative Scholarship: The Monastic, Benedict, and Wiseian Options”

Philip Scranton, Rutgers University
“Fixing Holes in the Plan: Maintenance and Repair in Communist Europe, 1945-1970” [READ PAPER]
Lee Vinsel, Stevens Institute of Technology
“The Stories We Tell, or, Mary Poppins, Maintainer” [READ PAPER]
Misha Rabinovich and Caitlin Foley, UMass Lowell
“Maintenance Art and Extreme Sharing” [READ PAPER]

Roger Turner, Dickinson College
“Aviation Meteorology: How Flight Safety depends upon the Repetitious Production of Constantly Expiring Knowledge” [READ PAPER]
Heidi Voskuhl, University of Pennsylvania
“The Politics of Maintenance: Electricity, Socialism, and John McClane’s Tireless Fight Against Evil” [READ PAPER]
Andrew Meade McGee, University of Virginia
“The Computer Shop Around the Corner: Neighborhood PC Repair Businesses as Sites of Maintenance and Technological Dissemination”
Andrew Russell, Stevens Institute of Technology
“Maintaining the Internet” [READ PAPER]
Nicholas Barron, University of New Mexico
“Archival Maintenance in the American Southwest: Exploring the Coproduction of Anthropology and Settler Colonialism on the Ground” [READ PAPER]

Renee Blackburn, MIT
“Maintaining the Future: The Boston Busing Crisis in the 1970s” [READ PAPER]
Matthew Hersch, Harvard University
“Return, Repair, Refly: Spaceflight Strategies for a Resource-Limited Age” [READ PAPER]
Roger Launius, National Air and Space Museum
“A Clash of Engineering Cultures? NASA Engineers, R&D Culture, and the Space Shuttle as an Operational System” [READ PAPER]
Jim Fleming, Colby College
“Atmospheric Maintenance: Temporal and Spatial Considerations” [READ PAPER]

Nathan Ensmenger, Indiana University
“When Good Software Goes Bad: The Unexpected Durability of Digital Technologies” [READ PAPER]
Stephanie Dick and Dan Volmar, Harvard University
“GOTOHELL.DLL: Software Dependencies and the Maintenance of Microsoft Windows” [READ PAPER]
Greg Bloom, Open Referral
“The Tragedy of the Directories: Towards the Maintenance of Community Resource Data as a Digital Public Good” [READ PAPER]
Bradley Fidler, UCLA
“The Dependence of Cyberspace: Political and Technical Maintenance of Internet Resources”

Alex Wellerstein, Stevens Institute of Technology
“Maintaining the Bomb: The High Price and High Stakes of Keeping the Nuclear Weapons Complex Running” [READ PAPER]
Amy Slaton, Drexel University
“Mere Maintenance: Stratified Industrial Labor and The Reproduction of Human Difference” [READ PAPER]
Patrick McCray, University of California Santa Barbara
“Maintaining a Mountain of Magical Thinking” [READ PAPER]
Kevin Brown, Carnegie Mellon University
“Environmental History and ‘Maintenance’: The Case of the Devils Hole Pupfish” [READ PAPER]

Fallon Aidoo, Harvard University
“The Right to Work on Rights-of-Way in the Age of Deregulation” [READ PAPER]
Ellan Spero, MIT
“‘A Card for Everything, Miss Whittle!’ – A Maintainer’s Approach to the Organization of Academic-Industrial Research at the Mellon Institute for Industrial Research” [READ PAPER]
Hugh Lester, Stevens Institute of Technology
“Program Manager for Life” [READ PAPER]
Brandon Benevento, University of Connecticut
“Shaping the Future: The Political-Economic Possibility of Maintenance” [READ PAPER]

Ann Johnson, Cornell University
“Insurance as a Key Element in Risky Socio-technical Systems” [READ PAPER]
Dan Gregory, Common Capital
“That New Car Smell: Social Innovation, Maintenance, and Civil Society” [READ PAPER]
Dan Holbrook, Marshall University
“Discipline and Polish: On Wiping and Wipers” [READ PAPER]
Daniel Levinson Wilk, Fashion Institute of Technology
“Hotel Maintenance Made Easy” [READ PAPER]