Maintainers II: 2017

April 6–9

Art Installation

Rachel Ivy Clarke, Syracuse University
“The Invisible Maintenance of Bibliographic Data” [READ BLURB]

Thursday, April 6

Social Order / 3-4:20 pm

• Scott Knowles, Drexel University
  “Trump the Maintainer” [READ PAPER]
• Paul Kreitman, Columbia University
  “Attacked by Excrement: Maintaining Nightsoil Distribution Networks in 20th century Tokyo”
• Arwen Mohun, University of Delaware
  “Maintaining Empire: Local Knowledge and European Technology in the Congo Free State” [READ PAPER]
• Marisa Leavitt Cohn, IT University of Copenhagen
  “Holding On and Letting Go: Configuring Timescapes of Infrastructural Maintenance Work” [READ PAPER]

Labor / 4:40-6 pm

• Jérôme Denis & David Pontille, Mines-ParisTech
  “Object Ontologies and the Contrasted In/Visibilities of Maintenance Work” [READ PAPER]
• Amy Gonzales and Ilana Garshon, Indiana University
  “Looking for Work While Dependably Digitally Unstable”
• Juris Milestone, Temple University
  “The Maintainer as Exotic Other” [READ PAPER]
• Melinda Hodkiewicz, Lisette Kanse, and Kathy Parkes, University of Western Australia
  “Policies, Practices, and Procedures: Maintainers Talk about Their Work” [READ PAPER]

Reception / 6:00-7:30 pm

Friday, April 7

Learning / 8:45-10:00 am

• Nina Lerman, Whitman College
  “Tinkering with Apprenticeship: Industrial Adaptations of Youth Training”
• Amy Sue Bix, Iowa State University
  “Messaging Gendered Lessons About Maintenance: Farm Equipment, Domestic Appliances, and University Expertise” [READ PAPER]
• Daniel Belteki, University of Kent
  “Caring for the Circle: The Maintenance of the Airy Transit Circle, 1851-1861” [READ PAPER]

Community / 10:20-11 am

• Peter Sachs Collopy, University of Southern California
  “Democratizing Maintenance with The Spaghetti City Video Manual”
• Jessica Meyerson and Chuck McClenon, University of Texas at Austin
  “Campus Computing Cultures, Mainframe Retirement and Meaningful Reuse” [READ PAPER]

Elevators /11:15 am-12:00 pm

• Dr. Angelo Ippolito, DC, LIC Chiropractic
  “Chiropractors Maintain Elevator Repairmen”
• Patrick Carrajat, LIR Group, Inc.
  “Elevator Repairmen Maintain Elevators”
• Daniel Levinson Wilk, SUNY-Fashion Institute of Technology
  “Elevators Maintain Society”

Military / 12:45-2:00 pm

• Layne Karafantis, National Air and Space Museum & Daniel Volmar, Harvard University
  “Idiot-Proofing the Air Force: Human Factors Engineering and the Crisis of Systems Maintenance” [READ PAPER]
• John Dean Davis, Harvard University
  “On the Angle of Repose”
• John Horgan, Stevens Institute of Technology
  “Will ‘Disruptive’ Military Innovation Make Us Safer?”

Computer / 4: 2:30-3:45 pm

• Corinna Schlombs, Rochester Institute of Technology
  “Forgotten Workers of the Information Revolution: Women Keypunch Operators” [READ PAPER]
• David C. Brock, Computer History Museum
  “Software Preservation, or, The Eternal Maintenance of Circa 1980 Floppy Disk Drive Peculiarities”
• Jean-Christophe Plantin, London School of Economics and Political Science
  “The Value of Maintenance in a Big Data Age: The Ethnography of a Social Science Data Processing Unit”
• Bradley Fidler, UCLA
  “Labor, Routing Architecture, and the End-to-End Principle”

Continent / 4:00-5:00 pm

Editors and contributors, including:

• Lara Houston, Goldsmiths University
  Steve Jackson, Cornell University
  Daniela Rosner, University of Washington
  Laura Forlano, Illinois Institute of Technology

Reception: Make, Break, Repair /  5:00-6:30

Saturday, April 8

Chemicals / 9:00-10 am

• Evan Hepler-Smith, Harvard University [READ PAPER]
• Henri Boullier, IFRIS [READ PAPER]
• Leah McEwen, Cornell University [READ PAPER]  [VIEW SLIDES]

“Transhistorical first-person reflections on science, safety, and information”

Disability / 9:00-10 am

• Elizabeth Guffey, SUNY Purchase
  “Wheelchairs: The Case for Care and Repair”
• Laura Mauldin, University of Connecticut
  “Train that Brain! Women’s Work and Children with Cochlear Implants”
• Wanda Katja Liebermann, Florida Atlantic University
  “Maintaining the Status Quo: Architecture and the Bureaucracy of Disabled Access”

Workers / 10:30-11:45 am

• Yulia Frumer, Johns Hopkins University
  “Robots, Women’s Labor and the Social Maintenance of Japan” [READ PAPER]
• Donald F. Clark, Virginia Tech
  “The Unfolding of Maintenance from Workplace Automation” [READ PAPER]
• Bonita Carroll, University of Western Australia
  “Making the Invisible Visible: Maintenance Workers in Late Modernity”
• Brandon Benevento, University of Connecticut
  “Maintainers in Basements: Contradictory Images of Good Work in Fictional Depictions of Corporate Upkeep”

Bodies / 10:30-11:45 am

• Grace Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  “Microbial Labor and the Maintenance of Cultural Heritage in an Italian Laboratory”
• Rebecca Jablonsky, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  “The Body as a Site of Maintenance and Innovation: Gendered Labor Divisions in Wellness and Body Modification Practices” [READ PAPER]
• Deanna Day, Chemical Heritage Foundation
  “Infrastructures of Hope: Taking Care of Medicine in Southern California”

Tradition / 12-1:30 pm

• Timothy Johnson, University of Georgia
  “Merchants of Sprout: Maintaining Yield and Jim Crow with Fertilizer”
• Dan Holbrook, Marshall University
  “Piles of Stuff: Haystacks, Self-Maintenance, and Discipline” [READ PAPER]
• Jesse Adams Stein, University of Technology Sydney
  “Keeping the Axe Workshop Going: Australian Manufacturing and the Hidden Maintenance of Traditional Practices” [READ PAPER]
• Nancy Anderson, Johns Hopkins University
  “Maintaining and Destroying Apartheid” [READ PAPER]

Governance / 2:15-3:30 pm

• Adelheid Voskuhl, University of Pennsylvania
  “Maintaining the State: Civil Service, Engineering, and Class in Pre-Industrial and Industrial Ages, 1713-1914” [READ PAPER]
• Aaron Clark-Ginsburg, Stanford University and Rebecca Slayton, Cornell University
  “Maintaining Cybersecurity Regulations in Critical Infrastructure” [READ PAPER]
• Stephanie Steinhardt, Cornell University
  “Breakdown and Repair at the Ends of Infrastructure”

Telephones / 2:15-3:30 pm

• Matthew Hockenberry, New York University
  “Shopping for the System” [READ PAPER]
• Fabian Prieto-Ñañez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  “Repair Spaces and Technological Cannibalism in Bogota, the Athens of South America” [READ PAPER]
• Shari Wolk, New York University
  “The Troubles of Trouble Men”
• Joshua Bell, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution and Joel Kuipers, The George Washington University
  “Intimate Materialities in Cell Phone Repair: Performance, Anxiety, and Expertise in DC Repair Shops”

Meaning / 4-5:15 pm

• Amy Wickner, University of Maryland
  “Waste, Remediation, and Maintenance in the 19th century Paris Sewer” [READ PAPER]
• Ellan Spero, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Singapore University of Technology and Design
  “The Diplomacy of Maintenance:  UNESCO, and the Construction and Conservation of ‘World Heritage’”
• Allison Marsh, University of South Carolina
  “Maintaining Museums: Examining our Crumbling Cultural Infrastructure”
• Michael Steinmann, Stevens Institute of Technology
  “What is Wrong with Inequality?” [READ PAPER]?

Fixes / 4-5:15 pm

• Nick Hall, Royal Holloway University of London
  “Getting it Going, Keeping it Going, and Bringing it Back to Life: Maintenance as Research Methodology”
• Alicia Maggard, Brown University
  “Making Goods Durable: Salvage and Repair in the Steam Navigation Industry”
• Hillel Arnold, Rockefeller Archive Center
  “What’s Wrong and How to Fix It: Woody Guthrie and the Maintenance of Folk Music”
  [READ PAPER]
• Liliana Gil Sousa, New School for Social Research
  “Quick-fix as Innovation? Thoughts from Brazil” [READ PAPER]

Sunday, April 9

Workshop: Maintenance as Practice

• Hugh Lester
  Stevens Institute of Technology and Dewberry, Inc.
• Ellyn Lester [READ PAPER]
  Stevens Institute of Technology
• Ben Helphand
  Executive Director, NeighborSpace
• Tom Arnold
  CEO, Gridium, “Why Aren’t the Wrenches Turning on Preventive Maintenance?” [READ PAPER]
• Koen Berghmans
  Independent Researcher and Invitee at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’ Architecture de Saint-Etienne
• c
  Founding Member, ARGO (Advanced Research in Government Operations) [READ PAPER]
• Christopher Klesges
  Stevens Institute of Technology
• Ann Wu and Sharon Irish
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [READ PAPER]
• Kyle Wiens
  CEO, iFixit [READ PAPER]