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Short abstract:

Removing graffiti from the city surfaces is commonplace for decades. Usually considered as a straightforward operation consisting in maintaining public order, removing graffiti instead requires care, intimate gestures and skilled techniques in front of building facades.

Long abstract:

Urban environments are composed of various surfaces that display inscriptions, some of which being unofficial and unauthorized. Qualified as defacements that disrupt the sociomaterial order of city, these inscriptions are regularly removed as part of graffiti removal municipal programs. Usually considered as a straightforward operation consisting in maintaining public order, removing graffiti instead requires care and intimate gestures. To illustrate that, furthering some research in maintenance and repair studies (Jackson 2014; Denis and Pontille 2015; Domínguez Rubio 2016), I will investigate graffiti removal interventions in Paris, and emphasize three main aspects. First, a matter of attention, each removal intervention starts with two subtle, crucial gestures: staring at the graffitied surface and touching it carefully. These gestures cultivate a “sensual knowledge” (Dant 2010) of the city surfaces and of their material fragilities. Second, the concrete handling of the removal techniques goes through the uncertain exploration of an “ecology of materials” (Ingold, 2012) during which the graffitied surface and the workers’ body can be lastingly affected. Maintaining the facades of Paris graffiti-free is a matter of tempo and accuracy that goes through a delicate choreography. Third, removing graffiti not only means sensing surfaces, but also making ontological differences among material entanglements. It consists in separating the graffiti from its inscription surface by navigating a variety of substances whose properties, agency and interaction are experienced in the course of the intervention. Unpredictable, the result can be a (partial) success or a failure. In any case, removing graffiti is always transformative.

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Long abstract:

In response to resilient philosophical tendencies to privilege disembodied concepts known by rational minds and to ignore material knowledges, in this paper, I centre repair practices as sites of deep if marginalized intimate knowledge about material reality (ontologies) that offer important openings for thought, clarification, and conceptual work. As part of a larger project on craft as ontological training for attending to “neglected things” (Puig de la Bellacasa), and by taking up the “biography” of objects (Kopytoff in Appadurai), I offer two related ways of thinking about the intersection of craft (techne) and care, noticing the importance in repair work of caring for craft, but also the ways in which repair crafting is itself care work.

I begin by thinking with Newfoundland artist Pam Hall’s careful questions about craft knowledge – of mending nets, fixing boats, knitting mittens – in the harsh North Atlantic: “What is this? Who made it? How? Where did it come from? How did it get here? How is it used and by whom in what season?” Such knowledges show up as deeply ontological and not only practical when we read them in the context of the crafting-caring-knowing-attending nexus in the specific form it takes in situations of repair work. I conclude by suggesting that attuning to craftwork and repair as tending with care can reorient critical STS practices to the demands of our material relations, toward concretely being and doing better with and for others.

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Long abstract:

In our digitalised societies (Floridi, 2015), gaming forms an expanding part of our working and leisure activities (Castronova, 2006; Dovey & Kennedy, 2006). This spread was further consolidated by the emergence of esports, or (professional) competitive gaming, and live streaming as extremely influential entertainment phenomena (T. L. Taylor, 2012, 2018). Although the socio-material aspects of these practices have been only recently brought into focus (Apperley & Jayemane, 2012), scholars have already highlighted how gamers are embedded in networks of material and digital actors (e.g., N. Taylor, 2022), which shape the meanings and practices of play (franzò, 2023). However, there is a lack of studies revealing the complex maintenance and care practices gamers and other professionals set forth to keep their peripherals operating. Thus, this work relies on archival and ethnographic data to unpack the affective relationship that competitive gamers, i.e., pro players, build with their gaming setups. As a matter of fact, pro players not only carefully care about the hard- and soft-ware components they use for performing, but constitute aspirational models shaping the aesthetic and material imaginaries surrounding computer games. By directly observing players' intimate and backstage gestures with their machines, this work unveils the depth of socio-material bonds that lie behind esports practices, where human and non-human actors are constantly engaged in mutual re-negotiations and influence to perfectly fit each other and obtain peak performance.

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Long abstract:

Owing to the strong recognition of the significance of care in more-than-human worlds (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), the paper explores the affective relationships between roboticists and robots in laboratory settings. Based on ethnographic data, we will argue that the interplay of different forms of affective knowing appears to be at the core of technoscientific knowledge practices. We, therefore, analyze the interplay of affective dimensions involving caring, neglecting, and fearing.

On the one hand, roboticists seek to connect with their robots by attaining a feeling for the machines (touching, observing, and imitating them), which we understand as embodied renderings of care. On the other hand, a central aspect of constructing robots is to cope with resistant facets of the machine that may challenge prescribed roles, fostering distrust and fear (i.e., roboticists insulting the robot and carrying an emergency button at all times). Additionally, robots are often only needed as long as projects are funded, ultimately leading to practices of neglect (i.e., tossing, forgetting, gutting).

Using data sequences in which roboticists design robotic movements, we will first examine practices of caring for robots. Secondly, we will present the other side of the medallion, which is neglecting robots when they become obsolete. Thirdly, we will focus on situations that display unforeseen and alarming behavior of robots, leading to distrust and fear. Ultimately, we aim to elucidate the potentials of the intricate interplay of different forms of affective knowing, drawing from Puig de la Bellacasa’s and Haraway’s onto-ethico accounts of more-than-human relatedness.

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Long abstract:

Scotland is facing a water supply crisis. Many rural communities have longstanding struggles with private water supply quality and reliability and in recent years Scotland’s otherwise efficient public water supply has faced similar problems. These challenges are set to increase as the climate changes. In line with the Scottish Government’s vision of a ‘Hydro Nation’, the country has a growing preoccupation with transforming water supply infrastructures and practices to meet these challenges. This paper draws on my experiences as an anthropologist and applied interdisciplinary social scientist researching the best routes forward for a change to the way Scotland’s water supplies are stewarded by and for communities in rural areas. I compare and contrast the living traces of longstanding practices of care associated with water and water infrastructures amongst communities in Scotland, with present day stewardship of water supplies and proposals for change. These practices are deeply entangled with both the wider stewardship of land and waterscapes in this region, and with people’s efforts to establish and maintain belonging and attachment to place, frequently in fraught circumstances. I bring my observations into conversation with an anthropology of infrastructure, at its intersection with the anthropology of care, setting out where those insights could help in the design of sustainable solutions.

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Long abstract:

Participants in biodiversity citizen science (CitSci) care not only about the species they monitor. Volunteers care about and for the digital data that they generate.

Paraphrasing Heuts and Mol (2013, p. 137), caring for CitSci data is embedded in activities that have other names, such as uploading and curating data, duplicating records in different digital environments and memorizing data. Data caring also means participants care for and tinker with (Mol and Hardon, 2020) the digital technologies used for data collection.

Like other forms of care work, CitSci data caring practices involve tensions and ambivalence (De la Bellacasa, 2011, 2017; Mol, 2010). For some of the 30+ interviewed participants, their biodiversity records are not just data they collect, submit, and forget about. Participants affect and are affected by data in multiple and “amphibian” ways. From an audio record of a frog uploaded to both the CitSci platform and social media, to a graph showing the impact of CitSci on the survival of endangered birds, data also have personal and emotional value. Data points might be a meaningful reason to continue monitoring, while losing access to data because of technological changes can discourage participants to continue volunteering.

These caring practices, with their tensions and ambivalence, are fundamental yet often invisible to contributory CitSci programs for which data collection is the main objective. My presentation will also discuss the implications of these findings for CitSci programs. For instance, if records are so meaningful, how may ongoing access to files be provided to volunteers?

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Long abstract:

This paper explores the maintenance in times of crisis using the example of a city where many actors have threatened critical urban infrastructure since its inception. The city of Aktau, located on the shores of the Caspian Sea, suffers from water shortages and power outages to the extent that at least one part of the city suffers daily. The infrastructure - the pipes, the sewers, the cables, the facades – has not been majorly and centrally updated since it was built in the late 1960–70s.

The city's infrastructure was built in the same decades, and now it is aging all over the city. The electricity grid cannot withstand the pressure of all the modern appliances, and the water, which comes from the Caspian Sea and is desalinated as the sea level falls, is increasingly difficult to access. However, the crisis is unfolding slowly and not instantaneously. The infrastructure still works to a degree that it is not completely unusable.

Here I focus on those who have to deal with the infrastructure as it slowly breaks down and falls apart - the residents, authorities, and maintainers. Through ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews, this paper explores how actors negotiate the adequate state of infrastructure through daily maintenance. Thus, I show how all the actors involved in maintenance engage in practices that are about moving back and forth between making the infrastructure work or deepening the crisis and conceptualize the state of never-ending brokenness (Martínez & Laviolette, 2019).

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Long abstract:

From 1927 to 1959, from the creation of the state company (PTT) to the fulfillment of the first completely automatic network in the world, the Swiss telephone infrastructure experienced a rapid development (Kronig, 2011).

This technological update was accompanied with daily activities of maintenance, essential to keep the service in function. Recent literature stressed how maintenance and repair are generally overlooked (Russel & Vinsel, 2020); Swiss telephony is no exception. Maintenance activities produced few information and technical documents, now stored at the PTT-Archiv (Köniz, Bern). The paper historicize the concept of maintaining (Krebs & Weber, 2021) analyzing how PTT workers perceived themselves; it uses as a main source "Union PTT", the weekly magazine of the PTT workers' union, and outlines an interesting finding: even maintainers did not perceive themselves as maintainers.

In Union PTT, articles on maintenance are rare. The general lack of interest affected the self-representation of people that worked to “the main means by which the constant decay of the world is held off” (Graham & Thrift, 2007). These workers preferred to discuss other activities and consider themselves as innovators, instead of maintainers.

As a conclusion, the paper investigates the “very specific relationships” (Denis & Pontille, 2019) of these workers with the technological infrastructure. Their day-to-day “form-keeping” business was scarcely considered in a way that can be described, in Freudian terms, through the concept of “undoing”; on the other hand, they considered crucial their professional training, to be part of the innovative “form-giving” process held by their company.

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Long abstract:

I consider the restoration of a 1950s Cockcroft-Walton accelerator inside a science museum under the framework of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) (UNESCO, 2003). This anthropological concept can be applied to the tangible domain of science collections, considering care practices (Alivizatou, 2012). In our century the concept of cultural heritage has undergone a process of rethinking inside many institutions. Referring to intangible assets such as dance, language, crafting techniques, ICH challenges Eurocentric assumptions about monumentalising tangible goods; it reconfigures heritage’s materiality as a function of performative traditions, perpetuated and renewed throughout generations; it appeals to subjectivity and to memory maintenance, enlarging and deconstructing how we understand heritage (Bortolotto, 2013; Turgeon, 2016).

Observing the work on the accelerator illuminates a memory transmission charged of affection as well as of scientific notions, involving a plurality of actors and epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina, 1999): laboratory technicians, restorers, curators, filmmakers. This “heritage community” (Tauschek, 2015), debating about the original artefact’s aspect, crafts its supposed “authenticity” (Jones & Yarrow, 2013; Geindreau et al., 2016). The artefact is cut out from the domain of common things and transformed in a museum object, but this "singularization" does not happens at once: it involves circular processes, aimed at the transmission of intangible cultural values along with material assets (Kopytoff, 1986, Dominguéz Rubio, 2016). In science museums, considering the ICH framework helps to reconfigure historical narratives in a less, universalistic direction, disclosing in public contexts the intimate situatedness of technoscience and of its representations (Casonato, 2024, forthcoming).

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Long abstract:

In the realm of biotechnology-driven limb prosthetics, the intricate relationship between individuals and their prosthetists unfolds as a nuanced dance of expertise and embodiment. Prosthetists, possessing a unique amalgamation of biomedical and engineering knowledge, navigate a landscape where each patient’s physical uniqueness demands personalized solutions. In this interdisciplinary field, expertise is not derived solely from laboratories but is intricately interwoven with the prosthetists’ experiential insights.

This study delves into the multifaceted world of prosthetics within the distinctive socio-cultural context of China. Beyond the conventional roles of doctors or engineers, prosthetists emerge as bricoleurs, crafting solutions from available resources and responding to social-cultural challenges. Drawing on fieldwork within a northern Chinese prosthetic company, this research explores prosthetists’ practices through the lens of bricolage.

The analysis unfolds in three dimensions. First, improvisation plays a pivotal role as prosthetists constantly redefine tools and methods to make do with "what's available", deviating at times from established guidelines, to accommodate the heterogeneity of materials and bodies. Second, the organizational order of materials becomes dynamic. When materials often interact with each other, creating results that the prosthetists cannot foresee, he/she must react to the results appropriately. A case study involving the application of carbon-fibre illustrates the pragmatic selection of materials over mere popularity. Finally, prosthetists’ tinkering with prosthetics is often experimental and unpredictable with success often manifesting itself as a serendipitous event. Try, succeed, try again...it is in this cycle that prosthetists figure out patterns that are difficult to replicate.

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Long abstract:

Tracing phantom networks is an experimental form of infrastructural inversion that exposes the politics of technologies and infrastructures in decay. This method draws attention to (more or less) organized practices in the margins of technologies and their infrastructures, and carefully pieces together broken and erased infrastructures from the past. I developed this method while researching the development and abandonment of an online health portal. My aim was to explore what insights I could yield from 'staying with' the portal after its development was formally discontinued in 2012. The portal left behind a phantom network of weakly associated material traces – including blog posts, newspaper articles, scientific papers, and emails – that remind us of a past initiative in regional health information exchange. Although the portal was no longer maintained to serve its original purpose, it was subjected to various forms of repair work throughout the years. Most notably, it was repurposed and strategically reconfigured to initiate new projects in regional health information exchange elsewhere. As a political intervention, tracing phantom networks casts a new light on abandoned, premature, or foolish plans; it makes visible (dis)continuities in infrastructural development, and helps to reimagine future infrastructures accordingly. At the same time, tracing phantom networks is a careful form of repair work: a fundamentally affective (and sometimes painful) intervention that helps to piece together a genealogy of infrastructures – people, things, and ideas – that is continuously at risk of being forgotten, lost, or strategically erased.

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Long abstract:

Known as the city’s “lifeline,” Mumbai’s suburban railway network is one of the oldest, largest, and most densely-packed urban public transport systems in the world. Suburban trains, technically known as electric multiple unit (EMU) rakes, therefore require continuous preventive and corrective maintenance at sites like workshops, carsheds, stabling lines, and even when in service. This presentation draws on my ongoing ethnographic research with engineers and workers at one such site, one of the oldest carsheds in Mumbai. Inspired by the recent volume Infrastructural Love (Frichot et al. 2022), my presentation extends the idea of “infrastructural care” (Chakraborty 2023) to examine how engineers and workers’ reparative interventions and maintenance practices not only fix broken technical systems, but are also vital in sustaining the health and stability of the network and the city’s spatiotemporal flows at large. However, such intimate, embodied acts of care are compounded by the Indian Railways’ bureaucratic structure, the complexity and scale of machines, and neoliberal divestment in public works. In exploring these tensions, I ask: Can we continue to think of preventive and corrective maintenance as care, especially in contexts where repair and maintenance are embedded in power relations of state and capital (Henke & Sims 2020)? How do we recognize and reassert the politics and ethics of care in places where it seems out of place (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017)? How do we address other related questions of accessible and sustainable public infrastructures and the social contracts that upheld them (Bear & Mathur 2015)?