Send message to Authors

Short abstract

Waiting has been sidelined in STS. Discussed in passing as part of care work and slow technology adaptation, we argue for foregrounding waiting in STS as a skilled, normative infrastructural practice that emphasizes labor, judgment, and the politics of postponement.

Long abstract

We argue that waiting has been sidelined in STS. Although noted as part of care work (de la Bellacasa 2018; Mol et al 2010) or slow, awkward adaptation (Suchman 2007), waiting has not been treated as a central mode of engagement. We therefore seek to develop waiting as a skilled, normative form of infrastructural practice. Drawing on our collective and individual multi-sited ethnography of repair workers, engineers and public authorities in Denmark and Greenland, we show that breakdowns - aging hardware, supply gaps, cyberattacks - are often managed through sustained postponement: patient, uneasy, and skillful forms of ‘doing nothing.’ Waiting is not mere passivity or failure but a practiced repertoire that shapes what is maintained, upgraded, or allowed to decay. We identify three repertoires of waiting: (1) promissory waiting, or the anticipation of future upgrades or improved conditions; (2) infinite waiting, or endurance in an open-ended meantime; and (3) deliberate waiting, or institutionalized slowness as an intentional strategy. Each repertoire mobilizes different expertise (from ‘obsolete’ technical know-how to tacit judgment about when to act), elicits distinct moral evaluations, and redistributes agency between humans and technologies. Attending to waiting shows maintenance to be temporally heterogeneous and ethically fraught, and it challenges solutionist narratives of repair and progress. Centering waiting contributes an analytic vocabulary for the labor, judgement, and politics of postponed practice, and reframes deliberate inaction as a form of infrastructural care.

Send message to Authors

Short abstract

This paper examines how emergent human volunteer infrastructures, namely data rescue efforts, can be maintained. We draw on semi-structured interviews with data rescuers in the United States to explore practices of waiting and maintenance during and in between times of crisis.

Long abstract

The US federal government has invested considerably in collecting societally relevant data, ranging from environmental data to national census data. These data were collected, curated and visualised by bespoke infrastructures, but are used by a wide range of government bodies, academics and civic organisations. The Trump administration has significantly disrupted the status quo of federal data, removing/editing datasets and cancelling infrastructure funding. In response, a number of activities have emerged to focus on “data rescue” - efforts to identify and secure data sets at risk. These data rescue activities can be characterised as largely volunteer-driven, emergent in times of crisis, and precariously funded.

Understanding that these times of crisis are likely to repeat, it becomes important to ask how emergent human volunteer infrastructures can be maintained both in and between crises. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with data rescuers in the United States, we examine practices of waiting and maintenance both during and in between times of crisis. We see how data rescue itself is a practice of waiting and response: waiting for data to be threatened or infrastructures to be defunded; ‘waiting it out’ for moments of crisis to pass; or of waiting for future threats, which involves “anticipatory maintenance” (Rothfritz, 2026) in times of rest as well as crisis. Our findings demonstrate that waiting is not a passive practice, but one that involves visible activities as well as more invisible moments of connection, regeneration and vulnerability.

Send message to Authors

Short abstract

Drawing on rhythmanalysis, this article explores how humanitarian infrastructures sustain and transform regimes of waiting. Queues around offices and distribution systems organize refugees' everyday life, shaping moral economies of access and improvisations as practices of endurance.

Long abstract

“Come back tomorrow” becomes a refrain. Waiting structures the routines of displaced people. Based on ethnographic rhythmanalysis, this article explores the practices that shape, sustain, and transform humanitarian waiting-scapes. It argues that infrastructures of humanitarian governance produce distinct regimes of waiting.

In the Nakivale refugee settlement, waiting organizes daily life around mobile clinics, consultation rooms, distribution points, resettlement and protection offices. Yet waiting exceeds administrative delay. The future becomes an affective force acting upon the present, orienting gestures and decisions, a “memory of the future” (Manning).

Waiting spaces are sites of exposure to violence: from assaults within queues to risks intensified by returning home late after a day spent waiting. There is also the violence of waiting in spaces never designed for reception, which may reactivate traumas linked to displacement.

Within these conditions, moral economies of waiting emerge. Beyond institutional triage based on vulnerability categories, the day-to-day discretion of the staff in charge and refugee-to-refugee ethics shape queueing dynamics. A pregnant woman may pass first, a teacher may be served sooner as it affects a whole class.

The article traces the improvisation techniques (Simone) unfolding in these waiting-scapes. Yet, as the prospect of resettlement gradually fades, waiting under such conditions remains a wearing exhaustion (Povinelli). For some, waiting eventually becomes impossible. Stopping waiting then takes different forms: withdrawing through alcohol or suicide, repatriating, leaving for the capital city. There, another regime of waiting, more diffuse yet no less structuring. Waiting rarely disappears. It is displaced, diffused, internalized, or delegated.

Send message to Authors

Short abstract

Through exploring how Greenland and Denmark collaborate to govern Greenlandic digital infrastructure, different registers of “good” governance emerge. This paper shows how this collaboration is sustained through practices of waiting.

Long abstract

How is waiting done in the governance of Greenlandic digital infrastructures? While many areas of Greenlandic governance have been “taken home”; areas such as frequencies and national (Kingdom of Denmark) security policy remain in Denmark. In our paper, we examine how waiting emerges within the collaboration in governing Greenlandic digital infrastructure between Danish and Greenlandic agencies.

We position Greenland and Denmark’s collaboration as enacted and negotiated through ongoing organisational practices, practices that wait, care for, and maintain the governance of Greenlandic digital infrastructures (Denis & Pontille, 2025). Drawing on Heuts’ and Mol’s (2013) study of what makes a “good tomato” and working from a praxiographic methodological stance (Mol, 2002), we do not aim to provide an answer to how governance across Greenland and Denmark should be carried out. Instead, we focus on what emerges in practices where the ‘goodness’ of governance is at stake.

Our analysis shows how waiting, enduring relationships, defined responsibilities, pragmatic alignments, and adhering to the specific conditions of Greenland emerge as registers of ‘good’ governance for Greenlandic digital infrastructures. These practices shape the everyday governance of digital infrastructural work in Greenland, showing how resilience emerges through sustained practices of ‘good’ governance.

Send message to Author

Short abstract

This paper studies waiting in practice within digital infrastructures in Greenland. Based on ethnographic research on internet disruptions in Tasiilaq, it examines everyday responses and practices to digital disruption, and explores how waiting and infrastructural care shape life in rural Greenland.

Long abstract

Infrastructures are often approached through moments of breakdown and repair (Jackson 2014). Yet in some places a common experience of infrastructure is neither fixing nor failing, but waiting: waiting for the signal to return, for technicians to arrive, or for explanations from the internet provider that may or may not arrive timely.

In Arctic regions such as East Greenland, where satellite infrastructures stretch across technical and administrative distances, disruptions are often diagnosed and resolved elsewhere. Internet breakdowns and disruptions therefore become known indirectly—through unstable signals, circulating stories about Tusass (the telecommunications provider of Greenland), short or non-existent announcements from the same provider, and everyday attempts to understand and work through what might be happening far beyond the town itself. At the same time, within waiting there matures ways of dealing with the slowness and the fluctuating internet. How does that everyday life look? Furthermore, this paper asks how the theme of waiting itself takes shape when it becomes an object of research. What happens when the analytical attention begins to zoom in on an often invisible and mundane activity?

Drawing on ethnographic research on internet connectivity and digital breakdowns in Tasiilaq, this paper asks how such waiting can be explored in practice. If waiting is not simply a pause between breakdown and repair, where does it appear in everyday life? How are internet disruptions endured, adapted to, and understood in a local and Inuk context?

Send message to Author

Short abstract

Is maintenance creative, does it have an aesthetics? These questions matters massively in a world in which a creativity dispositif (Reckwitz) has become dominant. In this contribution they are answered empirically by looking at aesthetic practices of a broad range of infrastructure maintainers.

Long abstract

Infrastructural maintenance is repetitive and does not fight for attention or aim for dramatic change. As such it positions itself firmly outside the ubiquituous creativity dispositif described by Reckwitz (2018). He argues that in an aesthetic regime of "the new", which has become dominant in late modernity, central goals are to evoke affects and to achieve attention.

Given this definition of what Reckwitz calls "aesthetic socialities", how would a truly infrastructural aesthetic regime look? Here we are not looking for the kind of infrastructural symbolism evoked by modernist mega-projects. Instead, we search for a system of aesthetic practices, which does not lead away from infrastructures but rather helps us to appreciate them in the non-eventful, passive, and inconspicuous states foregrounded in this conference session.

The search for an aesthetics of infrastructures presented here starts with the aesthetic practices of those who infrastructure: how do they try to evoke affects and achieve attention? The cases presented are selected strategically to represent very different forms of infrastructuring: as public service (e.g., awareness campaigns run by municipal public works), as part of an extractive digital platform (e.g., how Google and Microsoft present their infrastructural offerings), and as part of community self-infrastructuring (e.g., how digital activists style their self-organised platforms in the fediverse). Different as they are, they all have to solve the same problem, to engage audiences for something which is invisible, unspectacular, and ideally "just works".

Reckwitz, Andreas. 2018. “The Creativity Dispositif and the Social Regimes of the New.”

Send message to Author

Short abstract

Localization from below: how grassroots activists and computer scientists translate and maintain platform interfaces in Sardinian, navigating absent linguistic standards, fast release cycles, and the constant risk of losing their language online.

Long abstract

This presentation explores the management and maintenance of digital platform interfaces in Sardinian, a European minoritized language. Digital platforms and information infrastructures increasingly mediate linguistic presence and recognition, yet for languages such as Sardinian the process of localization is neither systematic nor institutionally supported. Instead, it relies largely on the initiative of active minorities, grassroots activists, and computer scientists who engage in “localization from below”, after an agreement with the platforms adiministrations. Through their efforts, platform interfaces are translated, adapted, and maintained in ways that reflect both the opportunities and the fragilities of digital infrastructures. A central challenge arises from the absence of widely accepted linguistic standards in Sardinian, which complicates translation practices and undermines the potential use of automatic translation tools.

More broadly, one can wonder whether the language itself is modified in the process of fitting into platforms interfaces. In this process, where tokenization is increasingly important, work on language relies less on lexicography and more on morphological approaches.

Platforms release at least ten version per year. Activists and loosely organized groups struggle to keep up with this rithm and face the constant risk of losing an interface in their language, replaced by the English one. This dynamic illustrated the difference between structured maintenance work and the same activity carried out at the margin of corporation and OECD countries.

By examining these dynamics, the presentation highlights how digital infrastructures both reproduce and reshape conditions of linguistic marginalization, while also creating new spaces for activism and experimentation.

Send message to Authors

Short abstract

This paper examines patients’ and clinicians’ experiences of waiting for uterus transplantation (UTx) in Denmark. We conceptualize waiting as a frontier; a generative and uncertain social, temporal, and emotional space that shapes medical innovation and patienthood.

Long abstract

Uterus transplantation (UTx) is an emerging frontier in reproductive medicine that offers women born without a uterus the possibility of gestation through transplantation. While clinical programmes have been established in several countries, UTx remains unavailable in Denmark, where it has existed for nearly a decade as an anticipated yet unrealized medical option. This paper explores experiences of waiting for UTx in Denmark. We draw on in-depth interviews with ten women diagnosed with Mayer–Rokitansky–Küster–Hauser (MRKH) syndrome; women considered ‘first in line’ for UTx. We also interviewed eight medical professionals contemplating the implementation of UTx. We examine how UTx is lived and negotiated in the absence of clinical access. Positioned at the edge of an emerging reproductive infrastructure, patients and clinicians wait at a frontier, inhabiting a temporal space marked by anticipation, uncertainty, and ongoing speculation about whether and when the procedure might or should become available. Hence, rather than approaching waiting as a mere delay preceding technological access, the paper examines how waiting itself becomes a central condition through which reproductive futures are imagined, negotiated, and sustained. We conceptualize waiting as a frontier in its own right; a generative space where social, temporal, and emotional dimensions shape medical innovation and patienthood. By foregrounding waiting as a central feature of emerging medical technologies, the paper contributes to STS discussions by showing how emerging biomedical futures are shaped not only through laboratories and policy decisions but also through the lived experiences of those who wait.

Send message to Authors

Short abstract

We propose the term “infrastructural triage” to describe the prioritization method for repairing aging bridges, in order to address the legacy of the massive aging of public infrastructure, which we conceptualize as an “emergency engineering” issue.

Long abstract

Much of the infrastructure in European countries was constructed between 1950 and 1970 as part of post-war reconstruction effort. This includes energy production facilities, transportation networks, public buildings, housing, and utility distribution systems (water, gas, electricity, and communication). Consequently, a whole generation of infrastructure is aging simultaneously, presenting a significant challenge for the coming decades in terms of infrastructure management and politics. Moreover, this “age of maintenance” (Denis & Florentin, 2025) is characterized by public disinvestment policies that have turned the management of public infrastructure into what we call an “emergency engineering” issue in the pursuit of resilient futures.

Through an inquiry into the activities of the SPW-MI, the Belgian public infrastructure manager, involving interviews, ethnography and document analysis, with a particular focus on the cases of aging and deteriorating bridges, we demonstrate how the organization’s routines and conceptual frameworks are being reconfigured to address this more-than-now phenomenon of aging infrastructure. We propose the term “infrastructural triage” to describe the active waiting method adopted by the public administration to cope with this situation. Similar to practices in emergency medicine, the SPW-MI implemented a triage strategy with specific criteria in 2024 to address the financial constraints and backlog of repair and maintenance projects. This strategy prioritizes the repair of certain bridges over others and involves abandoning those that cannot be saved to preserve the rest. We argue that infrastructural triage perfectly exemplifies postponement practices and the impracticability of maintaining the extensive infrastructure that our societies have constructed and continue to build.

Send message to Author

Short abstract

Always-on energy systems maintain a state of readiness, waiting to meet demand and absorb disturbances. However, maintaining such readiness requires considerable inputs, while reproducing dependencies and overconsumption. This study asks: what does infrastructure readiness promise, and at what cost?

Long abstract

A guiding idea in energy policy, “keeping the lights on” expresses the expectation of abundant, undisturbed energy supply. “Always-on” energy systems are held in a state of readiness, “waiting” to meet demand or absorb disturbances. Uninterrupted supply is frequently seen as non-negotiable and a matter of national security, sustaining modernity and particular social, economic, and temporal orders.

Sustaining uninterrupted energy supply requires constant work and maintenance, making readiness an active, resource-consuming, and technically organised form of waiting. Energy infrastructure requires anticipatory maintenance, emergency repairs, and grid extensions that build redundancy into the system. At the same time, always-on energy systems enable and reproduce practices, expectations, institutions, and technologies that depend on substantial amounts of continuously supplied energy. The imperative of “keeping the lights on” by maintaining technological resilience suppresses questions about energy sufficiency and the “needs” from which demand for uninterrupted supply arises.

This contribution explores what maintaining infrastructure in a state of readiness means in terms of its material demands and the promises it makes about uninterrupted provision of energy. Drawing from infrastructure studies and maintenance and repair studies, we investigate the strategies of securing the Finnish electricity grid through expert interviews and participant observation. We examine the professional, economic, and political realities of maintaining its readiness, asking how they contribute to creating dependencies and patterns of consumption. Contributing to debates on maintenance, sufficiency, and resilience, the study asks how the hard-earned promise of uninterrupted energy influences understandings of normality, directing the interlinked trajectories of societies and planetary states.

Send message to Author

Short abstract

Brazil’s new digital ID changes how Brazilians exercise their agency over the waiting times of state ID procedures. This new ID curtails well-established waiting strategies and imposes time-consuming demands. However, it can also give citizens the chance to develop new and beneficial strategies.

Long abstract

Brazil’s new digital ID infrastructure—the CIN or carteira de identidade nacional (‘national identity card’)—promises that the time citizens spend on identification procedures will be shorter and less painful. Nevertheless, the CIN often reinforces the same temporal difficulties it seeks to redress, such as longer waiting times for appointments.

State identification is often portrayed as both granting and taking away time from marginalized populations (Gordillo, 2006; Reeves, 2020). Vulnerable groups endlessly wait to access state ID infrastructures; however, they also invest their limited time into accessing these infrastructures to fight for their rights.

Within this dual dynamic, how do digital ID infrastructures introduce new challenges and coping mechanisms for waiting in and for state identification?

My answer relies on two important modifications introduced by the CIN. First, the CIN hinders communities’ pre-established time-management strategies by shifting identification procedures from municipal and state authorities to federal and private actors. Second, it demands new resources and knowledge (e.g., a working smartphone and digital literacy) from citizens that are time-consuming to acquire. However, these new demands can also reduce or even increase the benefits of waiting in ID procedures, such as bypassing unsympathetic local officials.

My focus on Brazil’s digital ID infrastructure contributes to debates over the agency of marginalized groups in their interactions with state ID infrastructures, highlighting how these groups make active use of the waiting time imposed upon them. I also show how digital ID infrastructures significantly shift the form, potentials, and limitations of this agency.

Keywords: Brazil, digital ID, waiting

Send message to Authors

Short abstract

How do “scientific outposts” shape infrastructural temporality — and does waiting itself become a mode of governing from the margins? Drawing on the ANR SciOUTPOST project, and combining archival research and interviews, this paper compares French research infrastructures located in remote places.

Long abstract

Research infrastructures are often equated with large, costly, and centralized facilities — yet many operate in remote, resource-constrained environments where resilience is a daily concern shaped by discontinuous maintenance, seasonal interruptions, and prolonged waiting. This tension between top-down institutionalization and bottom-up articulation of research practices constitutes the core problematic of this contribution. How do scientific outposts (Dumoulin Kervran et al., 2024) intertwined with colonial histories, governance, and power structures shape infrastructural temporality from the margins?

Since the 1970s–80s, physics and astronomy have relied on internationally networked facilities in the most remote places on earth, producing interoperable data and shared research cultures. The National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) progressively extended this infrastructure-based governance — through the Very Big Research Infrastructure (TGIR) Committee in 1988 and the Institute of Ecology and Environment (INEE) in the 2010s — to environmental and ecological sciences. Yet managing heterogeneous outposts in remote environments generates persistent tensions between standardized frameworks and locally situated knowledge, where waiting for logistics, weather windows, or funding cycles is constitutive of scientific practice.

Drawing on the ANR SciOUTPOST project, and combining archival research and interviews, this paper compares French scientific outposts’ research infrastructures — EPOS-France volcanology observatory in the Reunion, the ESO, the Concordia Antarctica base, tropical stations in French Polynesia and French Guiana, and EMSO-France Azores seabed observatory. It examines how waiting, maintenance, and standardization shape resilience and knowledge circulation, and identifies material, epistemic, geopolitical and social conditions enabling more decentralized practices at the edges of the research infrastructure landscape.