Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

Caring for Scholarship in Transition

Ali Kenner — 2024-04-15

This editorial briefly reflects on the idea of transition—a theme that cuts across energy systems, migration, and education, to name a few—and is likely familiar to many readers. In this issue, we focus on transition within the context of scholarly publishing; maintenance and repair studies; and experimental methods. We reflect on how the Issue’s thematic collection, “Maintenance & its Knowledges” guest edited by Jérôme Denis, Daniel Florentin, and David Pontille, raises ontological questions about the systems we continuously repair and maintain. We also introduce two original research articles, both of which discuss projects that used collaborative ethnography to disrupt normative modes of knowledge generation. Many of the articles in this issue engage the theme of socio-technical change, a classic STS topic that becomes a point of intervention, if at varying scales and using contrasting approaches. Collectively, the Issue can be read as a theory-method buffet that offers tools for working with and through transition.

Collaborative Ethnography and Matters of Care in Counterspaces

Coleen Carrigan — 2024-04-22

This paper offers a reflexive analysis of an interdisciplinary and cross-race collaboration to advance equity in engineering called LATTICE (Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: an Intentional Community in Engineering). We engage two bodies of scholarship—matters of care in feminist science and technology studies (STS) and critical race theory on counterspaces—to theorize on the data infrastructure and narrative practices that we developed when applying critical methodologies to collective action in technoscience. We discuss how our care practices conflicted with traditional ethnographic practices and thus, inspired us to innovate on methods. These methods—member-checking and polyvocal memo-ing—make transgressing the boundaries of LATTICE counterspaces for public dissemination possible by invoking caring as praxis. We conclude that using these methods to discuss the contradictions and challenges in STS collaborations is an opportunity for advancing mutual intelligibility among interdisciplinary scholars and a politics of knowledge production grounded in values of care and friendship that may contribute to equity and justice in technoscience.

Algorithms in the Margins: Organized Community Resistance to Port Automation in the Los Angeles Harbor Area

Taylor M Cruz — 2024-04-22

Public deliberations on artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) provoke strong interest in automation, or the perceived displacement of human labor due to general technological advances. Social science scholarship on well-compensated technology workers and a growing global underclass suggests automation remains largely a myth, with emerging technologies generating new forms of computational and emotional work. But little research has examined automation from the vantage point of community members at perceived greatest risk of displacement, such as those sustained by generations of logistics labor and physically located in racialized, underserved areas. In the United States and around the globe, logistics work is directly targeted by “automation engineers” to reduce labor costs on behalf of industry interests, posing a severe threat to port workers and their respective communities. This article examines organized community resistance to automation within the Los Angeles Harbor Area, drawing on four public hearings following the Port of LA’s planned integration of autonomous vehicles for the movement of cargo (i.e., automated straddle carriers). We find community mobilizations widely sought to enlarge public consideration of AI/ML to encompass matters of societal well-being and the collective good. These include shifting from the legality of AI integration to underscore public morality in light of anticipated harm, in addition to emphasizing the invisible social arrangements surrounding the Port and nearby community life. Our research reveals how lay people may reassert their own importance when confronted by technoscientific injustice, such as by reframing the future of work toward an insistence on “the future of our communities.”

Maintenance and Its Knowledges: Functional Exploration, Biographical Supervision, and Behavioural Examination

Jérôme Denis — 2024-04-22

This introductory article to the thematic collection entitled “Maintenance and its Knowledges” makes a significant departure from breakdown-centred studies. It foregrounds the epistemic virtues of maintenance, a practice that cultivates continuity, by examining a still underestimated and unexplored dimension: the forms of knowledge associated with maintenance activities. A twofold aim guides such an exploration. First, repair and maintenance interventions are examined as particular sites and moments of knowledge generation. Second, building on the scholarship dedicated to improvisation and learning dynamics in the Global South that has structured numerous works on maintenance, this article considers how it can be extended towards the Global North. Recalling that maintenance has been mostly investigated from the question of how, it stresses out the various tools involved in knowledge generation, the organisation of tasks at play in different settings and their politics. It then goes beyond the how question to embrace a more ontological perspective, focussing on what people do properly maintain, and what kinds of knowledge emerge at this particular moment. Such a line of inquiry opens up three directions towards which the production of knowledge is oriented in maintenance: functional exploration, biographical supervision, and behavioural examination.

“My Store is a Laboratory”: Knowledge Produced by Smartphone Repairers

Nicolas Nova — 2024-04-22

Focusing on the documents produced by Swiss smartphone repairers working in independent stores, this paper highlights the “knowledge trajectories” undertaken by the information these practitioners uncover by disassembling phones, annotate and sometimes share with peers, competitors or customers. Based on ethnographic vignettes, this visual essay shows and discusses the ways such stores can be seen as a counterpoint to academic or private research & development (R&D) laboratories—because of the situated knowledge they produce against manufacturers, and their goal that is not simply to understand how smartphones work and behave, but to help customers whose phones are broken or corrupted.

When to Care: Temporal Displacements and the Expertise of Maintenance Workers in Public Transport

Tobias Röhl — 2024-04-22

Fueled by digital developments modern wage labor is increasingly subject to new forms of temporal objectification. In the field of public transport, maintenance workers must deal with two recent developments. Predictive maintenance and the digital tracking of time temporally displace maintenance and repair work. When dealing with disruptions, such systems favor anticipatory measures and retrospective evaluation over work practices in the immediate aftermath. This challenges the professional expertise of workers and limits their ability of caring for the infrastructure on their own terms. While this limits the scope of practical knowledge in dealing directly with disruptions, it also opens up new avenues for autonomy and creates opportunities for reevaluing practical knowledge in other areas. The ability to improvise is increasingly important given that the systems are often unreliable and operate on the basis of vague assumptions. Instead of a de-skilling, a temporal shift occurs. Practical knowledge becomes important beyond immediate repair practices, namely before and after disruptions are dealt with.

Stewards of the Organization: The Management of Repair and Maintenance Work in Large Organizations

Alex Reiss Sorokin — 2024-04-22

Studies of repair and maintenance work have pointed to a gap between the way repair and maintenance work is prescribed and the way it is done in practice. This article seeks to contribute an empirical and conceptual account of what transpires in this gap. It focuses on repair and maintenance team supervisors who are both trained repair workers and managers. The article argues that supervisors use their knowledge of the organization alongside their knowledge of materials, people, and objects. To do their work, they articulate and negotiate competing interests and values, drawing on their experience as repair workers and on their managerial autonomy. In developing the concept of “working knowledge,” existing studies have tended to focus on the triangular relationship between customers, repair workers, and machines. This article contributes another dimension to “working knowledge,” arguing that supervisors and repair workers strive to unpack and interpret, to the best of their ability, not only what constitutes a breakdown or a repair but also what is desirable and beneficial for the organization. By closely tracing three cases in which team supervisors engage in organizational work and interpret managerial preferences, the article shows that repair and maintenance work is shaped not only from below, by interactions with materials, environments, and people, but also from above, by repeated attempts to order, organize, and manage it.

What Fragility? Multiple Professional Visions in the Maintenance of French Public Roads

Roman Solé-Pomies — 2024-04-22

A growing body of work in STS has highlighted the ambiguousness of infrastructure maintenance, as an activity that contributes to reproducing sociomaterial order while bringing to light its very fragility. The case of local public roads in France is instructive in this respect: for about a decade, a variety of public and private actors have been raising concerns about the fragility of this abundant infrastructure, questioning the organization of knowledge production for its maintenance after the withdrawal of centralized state engineering. This article draws on a multi-sited inquiry to extract three ethnographic vignettes that suggest the coexistence of multiple knowledges in road maintenance, oriented toward contrasted forms of fragility. I analyze these knowledges as professional visions (Goodwin 1994), associated with different notions of the most relevant expertise to make infrastructures last. The coexistence of multiple visions of infrastructural fragilities thus gives rise to new uncertainties: as the case may be, these visions might either contribute to a stabilized division of labor, or challenge existing institutional frameworks. These remarks invite us to systematically question the plurality of modes of knowing that organize infrastructure maintenance, in order to further widen the analysis of the complex relationships between material and organizational fragilities.

Non-Manipulable Things? Maintaining a Techno-Judicial Imaginary on Sealed Biological Samples in the French Criminal Justice

Vololona Rabeharisoa — 2024-04-22

This article investigates the maintenance of sealed biological samples in the context of the French criminal justice. It extends maintenance studies to judicial objects and introduces the topic of maintenance in legal materiality studies. Our contribution to these two bodies of literature is to deepen understanding of the epistemic and material politics of maintenance in a judicial context where the issue of authenticity of objects is crucial because of their legal liability. Sealed biological samples, which are associated to a techno-judicial imaginary on cold cases, exacerbate this issue of authenticity. Once sealed, biological samples used to produce forensic DNA profiles are stored for a period of 40 years at the Central Service for the Preservation of Biological Samples – Service Central de Préservation des Prélèvements Biologiques (SCPPB), a dedicated facility, and interventions are no longer authorised on them. What then does it entail to maintain these objects which are non-manipulable, at least to some extent? What are the ‘sciences of maintenance’ mobilised and generated for this purpose, if they exist at all? This article addresses these questions, drawing on the archives of the technical committee of the Fichier National Automatisé des Empreintes Génétiques (FNAEG)—the French national forensic database used by national police—from 1998 to 2016 and on a six-hour interview with the lieutenant-colonel head of the SCPPB. It shows how sealed biological samples raise intertwined debates on their very nature and on the competences and responsibilities of genetic experts, the SCPPB and the judicial authorities on the maintenance of their technical quality and their judicial potential. It examines the knowledges and practices of maintenance of these objects, which are distributed all along the process from their manufacturing on the crime scenes to their preservation at the SCPPB. Finally, it contributes analysis of the temporality of maintenance and the objects to be maintained. By and large, this article offers reflections on the subtle ways of maintenance in the material ordering of the judicial world.

Software Maintenance as Materialization of Common Knowledge

Mace Ojala — 2024-04-22

While development of software always implicitly takes place in contexts of inherited entanglements and legacies, its maintenance deals explicitly with what is already present. Software maintenance locates itself in media res, in the middle of things. Maintaining software typically involves intervening in the material archive of source code, documentation, and software tools. Doing so successfully requires relevant situated knowledge of how the software at hand already hangs together, and how to effectively put this knowledge to use. This knowledge builds on first-hand experience, acquired in practice over shared lifetimes of people and code. For code to continue to endure over time, ongoing articulation of its entanglements is externalized and materialized across contributing programmers and software development tools, each themselves vulnerable and in need of maintenance. This paper analyzes how this process of externalizing and materializing knowledge is negotiated. We conclude that the common knowledge which suspends the string figure of software in time and in a broken world (Jackson 2014) is always a locally hybrid assemblage which carries this knowledge forward. Hence, to maintain software well is to add on to its legacy.

Knowing with Microalgae: On the Maintenance of a Wastewater Treatment Prototype in an Ecovillage

Mandy de Wilde — 2024-04-22

In this article, we present a case study of an experimental set up of a microalgae-based wastewater treatment prototype in an ecovillage requiring many maintenance operations to function. Taking our cue from maintenance and repair studies, we focus on the embodied engagements by which caring for wastewater unfolds. We examine how aquatic ecologists, environmental engineers and villagers use their senses as instruments of inquiry when handling wastewater, as they observe its colour and smell its occupants, and manually check the connections between tubes and pumps. A multispecies body of microbial wastewater figures prominently, as the metabolism of three species of microalgae dwelling in the wastewater is key to the functioning of the prototype. Turning to insights from multispecies ethnographies of laboratory studies, we expand our focus on embodied engagements across the species barrier while maintenance unfolds. We show how ecologists, engineers and villagers engage in ‘knowing with microalgae’ as the algal community invokes and adapts its metabolism in surprising ways to the interferences stirred by their human caretakers. By juxtaposing three ethnographic stories about knowing (1) with hungry, (2) with stressed, and (3) with dying microalgae, we show how algal bodies are both object and instrument of inquiry. Unexpectedly, they also become, tools of repair, liaising with their human caretakers, with other microorganisms and with added chemicals in the wastewater, as well as natural forces such as heat, sunshine, and frost. Considering the maintenance of and by living matter such as microalgae, we raise questions about life and death as the object of maintenance shifts. In so doing, we urge for a multispecies perspective on maintenance that acknowledges that ‘the inclusion of nonhuman others from the animal/organic world produces a different set of ethical concerns than the engagement with technological entities’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 210, 159). This is needed as societies advance towards ecologically sustainable modes of living in which humans will progressively cohabitate with a wide variety of species as well as the technologies that house and facilitate them.