Short Abstract

This panel explores how people live, care, and repair in a world polarized by technology. We invite ethnographies of tinkering, maintenance, and improvisation that reveal how everyday acts create livable futures amid technological uncertainties.

Long Abstract

In a world increasingly entangled with machines, infrastructures, technological and ecological uncertainties, we all live as cyborgs – reliant on technologies that promise better futures yet constantly demand care and repair (Harraway 1991, Franklin 2006, Friedner 2022). On one side, technologically driven industries project transhumanist techno-utopian visions of enhancement and control. On the other, citizens, device-users, patients and caregivers, confront the everyday material limits of affordability, accessibility of (seemingly mandatory) technology (Hendren 2020). Between these poles, people negotiate the use of technology as they face life in an era when ecological damage (Taylor 2025), infrastructure (De Laet & Mol, 2000), health (Oudshoorn 2020, Liyanagunawardena 2023), life and death are polarized by technology.

This panel invites ethnographically grounded papers that explore the in-between spaces of care improvisations—where people maintain, mend, and adapt technologies and infrastructures in their everyday worlds. We encourage ethnographic studies that show how people navigate the conflicts of technologies in practice – how they tinker, tweak, improvise, repair, adjust, reuse, or recharge devices to align them with the changing bodies and material environments. We welcome submissions on topics including but not limited to:

What utopian imaginations motivate users of these technologies, and what realities confront them?

What vulnerabilities emerge and are renegotiated?

What does it mean to “repair the future” through acts of maintenance, care, and embodied negotiation?

We seek contributions that rethink repair not as a sign of breakdown but as an ethic of living with technological uncertainty in a divided world.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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