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Paper short abstract

Using 'friction' and 'seamlessness' to describe how moments of disruption become sites of ethical awareness through which people negotiate environments increasingly mediated by digital technologies. Thereby enabling people to repair the future by resisting integration into seamless systems.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that contemporary digital technologies increasingly aspires not merely to efficiency, but to seamlessness and as a result sublimate governance to hidden strata below everyday life: the withdrawal of technological systems from everyday awareness such that digital infrastructures appear natural. While often framed as progress, this aspiration encodes particular moral demands via forms of diffuse disciplining that are only really opened up during moments of technical failure and breakdown. Thus, breakdowns provide space for critical and ethical reflection. It is within this frictional space that citizens can negotiate ethical futures through mundane acts of adjustment and repair. These practices reveal how subjects are neither passive recipients of technological futures nor empowered co-designers, but situated actors continually repairing the conditions of livability.

This paper discusses frictional aesthetics and seamlessness to describe how moments of inconvenience, irritation, or disruption become sites of ethical awareness through which people preserve autonomy, identity, and relational life in environments increasingly mediated by automated judgement and platform governance. Rather than treating friction as a design flaw, the paper argues that such interruptions enable people to repair the future by resisting total integration into seamless systems.

This paper therefore takes up the panel question 'what does it mean to “repair the future” ...?' seeking to provide a theoretical frame that, in the words of the panel 'views repair not as a sign of breakdown but as an ethic of living with technological uncertainty in a divided world.'

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Paper short abstract

Platformized lockage systems promise transparency, efficiency, and safety, but they generate blind spots and new risks. Based on fieldwork at a canal lock in China, the paper shows how dispatchers and ship operators keep lockage workable through care, improvisation, and embodied judgment.

Paper long abstract

Digital modernization and smart governance agendas often frame waterways as fully knowable and controllable through data, automation, and platform governance. Drawing on long term ethnographic fieldwork at a canal lock on China’s Grand Canal, this paper examines how these promises collide with the material realities of a working lock. It follows waterway ETC and the Easy Lockage app as semi-automated infrastructures that translate lockage into standardized steps, data fields, and accountability chains, while reconfiguring how lock operation is coordinated, supervised, and justified.

This paper argues that platform transparency produces partial vision and new blind spots. Here, standardization and governance can generate an illusion of control, while digital traces multiply records and yet mask what matters in practice, including shifting wind, water levels, vessel positioning, and informal negotiations in anchorage zones. Near misses, queuing disputes, and routine manual cross checks show that safety is not secured by the system alone, but through continual repair work, improvisation, and embodied judgment that remain essential yet are often rendered peripheral as exceptions. Efficiency becomes a black box in which risk and uncertainty do not disappear but are redistributed and frequently backgrounded as long as throughput remains high and accidents are rare, leaving invisible threats to accumulate through everyday loopholes and obscured uncertainties.

By foregrounding maintenance and embodied expertise, this paper shows how platformized lockage is lived in between technological utopias and operational realities, and how repair becomes an ordinary way of keeping infrastructure workable under technological uncertainty.

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Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork with open-hardware supporters, this paper shows how they exchange repair skills to counter corporate tech’s material constraints and advance an alternative model of innovation beyond profit-driven logics.

Paper long abstract

In a world where technological futures are promised through ever more sealed, opaque devices, repair has become both an everyday struggle and a political horizon. This paper examines a transnational community of open hardware supporters who respond to the black-boxing of digital technologies and planned obsolescence by re-centering care, maintenance, and tinkering as ordinary technological practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with small-scale hardware producers, makers, engineers, and users in Turkey and the United States, I trace how these actors challenge material constraints of corporate tech by sharing designs, exchanging repair skills, and building commons-based markets oriented toward accessibility rather than profit.

I argue that open hardware supporters advance a past-oriented understanding of technological innovation that challenges corporate tech’s profit-driven model, which equates innovation with the successful commercialization of world-first inventions. Open hardware supporters draw on the past by referencing the repairable devices and radio amateurs of the 1950s and 1960s as formative examples. With open hardware practices they want to revive similar skills for today’s digital devices. This paper approaches the lost ability to repair technological devices as the enclosure of a once-existing technological commons, driven by the rise of profit-driven tech giants. By shifting attention from open source software to open hardware in commons-based markets, it focuses on the materiality of digital devices, which is harder for corporations to co-opt than software. Hence, the notion of novelty emerging in open hardware commons holds greater potential for egalitarian innovation that challenge profit-driven innovation.

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Paper short abstract

Facing local Internet infrastructure the state developed to disconnect from the global network, Iranians use sociomaterial practices to fix the disconnection and circumvent state regulation. I discuss the situated knowledge of users, the fragility of their fix and the care it needs to keep working.

Paper long abstract

During the 2026 protests, Iranian government shut down all means of communication for two weeks to silently unleash a bloody crackdown. This was possible due to state's project to build the "National Information Network" (NIN). In official language, NIN promises a local version of Internet that is faster and safer. But in reality it is set to regulate, and occasionally, cut access to the global network. In response, citizens resort to "Filtering Circumvention Tools" (FCTs), which bypass the censorship and mend the infrastructure to reinstate free navigation. I focus on the users' experiences of disconnection and practices of circumvention--drawing on digital ethnography of online discussions happening during recent shutdown, interviews with people whose job rely on Internet and participant observation with non-technical users trying to make their FCTs work. I aim to underscore how they thread together their devices, trusted communities that support them in times of crisis, and their situated knowledge about the infrastructure to create a fragile linkage against a broken infrastructure. Following infrastructural studies in STS and anthropology, I attend to the emergence of new temporalities, regimes of connection / disconnection, and divisions of local / global spaces that NIN causes and how these inform the practices of lay knowledge creation. By attending to the mundane and the fragile, this paper contributes to our understanding of what political defiance means in the digital age. I argue that lacking the political platform to influence the design of NIN, users have to find ways to negotiate with infrastructure directly.

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Paper short abstract

This paper explores “freshness” as a biopolitical technology during the 2022 Shanghai lockdown, showing how cold-chain infrastructures bureaucratically redefined what counted as safe and legitimate, producing food that was politically correct yet materially rotten.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines freshness as a biopolitical technology during the 2022 Shanghai lockdown, when suspended transport and logistics subjected both people and food to an anxious struggle for legitimacy and survival. Under conditions of extreme quarantine, freshness ceased to function as a biological condition governed by material processes of decay; instead, it was bureaucratically redefined through state-administered cold-chain infrastructures that determined what could safely—and legitimately—enter sealed neighbourhoods.

Drawing on ethnographic observations of food distribution under lockdown, I show how vegetables transported through officially sanctioned cold-chain routes frequently arrived biologically spoiled yet politically correct: rotten produce circulated as hygienic, virus-free, and administratively legitimate. This paradox reveals how bureaucratic regimes of safety displaced situated knowledge of preservation, while rendering material decay both normalized and invisible.

Conceptually, I engage Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism to analyse cold-chain logistics as an infrastructure of eternity: a techno-utopian promise that freezing, refrigeration, and logistical control could indefinitely secure freshness, safety, and life itself. Yet it was precisely this industrial logic of refrigeration that accelerated spoilage and transformed food’s “slow death” into an unseen condition masked by the aesthetics of industrialized freshness. Crucially, this logic was extended beyond food to the governed population, as residents’ legitimacy and mobility were similarly conditioned by low-temperature infrastructures and bureaucratic thresholds of safety. By foregrounding the gap between technological utopias of preservation and their material failures, this paper contributes to debates on infrastructural governance by showing how living through lockdown involved enduring the violence of infrastructural optimism.

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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how prosthetic users live between technological promises and material limits across China and the U.S. Sustaining prosthetic use involves ongoing adjustment, care, and endurance, as users navigate uncertainty, breakdown, and shifting bodies over time.

Paper long abstract

Prosthetic technologies are often embedded in techno-utopian imaginaries that promise restoration, enhancement, and control over bodily difference. Drawing on comparative ethnographic research with prosthesis users in China and the United States, this paper examines how people live in between these promises and the material realities of sustaining prosthetic use over time. Based on fieldwork with lower-limb prosthesis users in China and upper-limb prosthesis users in the U.S., we show that technological sophistication does not resolve the everyday conflicts of prosthetic life. Across both contexts, users face recurring breakdowns, bodily change, financial strain, and limited insurance coverage, which demand continuous tinkering, adjustment, and care. Rather than treating these difficulties as technological failure, we argue that prosthetic use is an ongoing negotiation with uncertainty, in which frustration, adjustment, and compromise become ordinary conditions of living with technology. Bringing these two sites into dialogue moves the analysis beyond explanations centered on national healthcare systems or technological insufficiency, revealing how prosthetic care is structured around assumptions of completion that do not align with long-term bodily and material instability. By foregrounding maintenance as an everyday practice rather than a response to breakdown, this paper contributes to discussions of repair, care, and vulnerability by showing how users “repair the future” through acts of endurance amid conflicting technological promises.

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Paper short abstract

Drawing on interviews with families of children with cochlear implants, this paper suggests that Chinese families prioritize pragmatic language therapy and care over the initial debate regarding implantation while their strategies are constrained by financial limitations and temporal exigencies.

Paper long abstract

In China, cochlear implants are promoted as an effective medical technology to assist people with profound hearing loss in integrating into a hearing society. An increasing number of Chinese children with hearing loss have received cochlear implants in recent years due to favorable medical insurance policies. However, implantation is only the initial stage; a long-term process of language therapy is required for them to acquire hearing and speaking capabilities.

Drawing on interviews with these families, this paper argues that many Chinese families are obliged to navigate financial limitations and temporal exigencies to support their children. In contrast to the moral debate of ‘implantation or not’ within the Deaf community in Western societies, Chinese families focus more on pragmatic support: medical choices, rehabilitation arrangements, and daily care. In these cases, families face a pressure that is intertwined with morality and temporality—specifically, the urge to hear as soon as possible and to hear ‘better.’ This discussion implies that medical technology acts as an affective force, mobilizing families to align their actions with moral imperatives while navigating distinct medical and social timelines.

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Paper short abstract

Engagement of diabetes patients with the Serbian state to receive medical technologies, in which acts of adapting and improvising with their own body to qualify to receive (and keep) medical technologies present creative acts of agency and repair in the face of organized abandonment.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I focus on the engagement of diabetes patients with the Serbian state to receive medical technologies and materials, where insulin pumps and sensors constitute sources of pleasure/displeasure, possibilities/impossibilities, care/harm (Winance 2010). Tinkering with the state regarding these medical aids in itself produces various affects and (im)possiblities. Medical technologies reconfigure the body and the self and how they are engaged with, and rendered knowable. Who qualifies for medical aids, knowing how to get them, having the opportunity to enter the process of receiving them, are complex issues. Acts of harming oneself and omitting the truth from the state in order to qualify to receive, and later, keep, medical technologies present acts of agency, rather than passive "waiting" for the possibility of receiving life-saving technology. What good care is in this case is thus a complicated matter, as it involves active interventions to one's own body to (potentially) receive (potentially) better care. Persons with diabetes in Serbia tinker among themselves, with patient organizations, with the state, and with technology and define what constitutes good care and the good life. The search for the good life via tinkering includes negotiations, asking questions, seeking advice, helping, receiving, collecting documents, managing technology, harming, keeping safe, experimenting, figuring out, mobilizing connections, enacting citizenship, waiting. What is equivalent to good diabetes care is contextual, and involves constant reconfigurations of the body, technology, and how the patients move in the world.