Maintainers II: 2017

April 6–9, 2017 | Stevens Institute of Technology

Wesley J. Howe Building

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

“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]