Paper 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.

Paper 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.

Paper short abstract:

This contribution focuses on the maintenance and care work that professional esports players perform with and on their gaming setups. By exploring the affective relationship these gamers maintain with their machines, the work will also highlight the importance of socio-materiality inside gaming.

Paper 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.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic observations, we explore affective forms of knowing in robotics, considering caring for, neglecting, and fearing robots. We aim to elucidate the intricate interplay of diverse affective forms of knowing, drawing on Puig de la Bellacasa’s and Haraway’s onto-ethico accounts.

Paper 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.

Paper short abstract:

As part of a larger project on craft as ontological training for attending to “neglected things," I theorize two intersections of craft and care, noting the importance in repair work of caring for craft, but also the ways in which repair crafting is itself care work.

Paper 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.

Paper short abstract:

The paper historicize the concept of maintaining analyzing how Swiss 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.

Paper 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.

Paper short abstract:

I introduce the method of tracing phantom networks as an experimental form of infrastructural inversion. This method exposes the politics of technologies and infrastructures in decay, and helps to piece together a genealogy of infrastructures at risk of being forgotten, lost, or strategically erased

Paper 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.

Paper short abstract:

In science museums, artefacts’ material aspect provides tangible, solid technoscience representations. The concept of "intangible heritage" challenges this assumption, addressing sociomateriality in constructing science history and culture. I take a particle accelerator restoration as a case study.

Paper 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).

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from fieldwork in a northern Chinese prosthetic company, the study borrows the metaphor of bricolage to analyse the prosthetists' work, when they navigate the need for personalized solutions in a diverse landscape from available resources and respond to social-cultural challenges.

Paper 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.