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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how risk becomes routine and safety is made ordinary at a lock on China’s Grand Canal. As technical ordering meets material uncertainty, laws, rules, and situated practices absorb disruptions. Care emerges through maintenance and repair to sustain operability.

Paper long abstract

Canal locks are often imagined as infrastructures of order: technical arrangements that regulate water, organize navigation, and promise passage that is efficient, safe, and increasingly smart. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork at a lock on China’s Grand Canal, this paper asks how safety is made ordinary when such promises of technical ordering meet the material uncertainties of everyday operation. In this setting, risk is not an exceptional disruption of normal lockage, and safety is not the opposite of risk. Rather, safety is a workable condition provisionally maintained through regulatory and situated practices while risk remains ever present.

The paper follows the layered arrangements through which uncertainty is translated into actionable and accountable forms of risk, including regulations, operating procedures, job responsibilities, logs, monitoring systems, digital records, and situated judgment. These arrangements classify risk and distribute responsibility, but they never render the lock fully knowable or controllable. In situations that exceed formal rules, technical visibility, and standardized categories, lock workers, maritime authorities, and ship operators continually check, wait, remind, delay, adjust, and make repairs. These ordinary acts absorb uncertainty before potential incidents become events, while also restoring workable order when small disruptions expose gaps in the system.

By foregrounding these preventive and reparative practices, the paper shows that safe passage is a regulatory, technical, and material achievement sustained through everyday care. Care here is an ordinary ethic of maintaining operability between technological promise and material reality.