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Paper short abstract

Repair in experimental physics labs includes debugging code, calibrating parameters, and interpreting unstable data. Ethnography at INFN shows how repair shapes future-making, stabilises instruments, reshapes roles, and sustains knowledge production.

Paper long abstract

Repair is often understood as restoring functionality after a breakdown. However, in complex experimental environments, repair is constitutive of the conditions under which knowledge becomes possible. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), I examine repair as an epistemic and infrastructural practice that sustains and reorganises scientific knowledge production. Focusing on the AGATA gamma-ray detector and its associated infrastructures, I analyse how vulnerability, maintenance, and repair stabilise experimental systems.

Experimental work unfolds within fragile sociotechnical arrangements characterised by malfunction, uncertainty, and instability. Physicists and technicians engage in collective debugging, improvised material interventions, and continuous adjustments to maintain operability. Digitalisation and automation do not eliminate repair but rather transform its forms and locations. Repair increasingly involves debugging experimental code, recalibrating oscilloscope parameters, and interpreting unstable digital signals. These interventions require situated expertise to determine whether anomalies originate in instrumentation, computational processes, or experimental phenomena.

Repair situations also reorganise epistemic roles and organisational relations. In moments of instability, coordination requires the redistribution of responsibility and expertise, occasionally incorporating the ethnographer into diagnostic and calibration procedures. Repair thus emerges as a distributed organisational accomplishment involving human actors, instruments, and digital systems.

By conceptualising repair as an epistemic and generative practice, this research contributes to STS scholarship on maintenance, repair, and epistemic infrastructures. It demonstrates how repair enacts the material and organisational conditions necessary to sustain experimental inquiry and enable future knowledge production.

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Paper short abstract

In the domain of critical information infrastructures sociotechnical anticipation and repair practices are organized in a cyclical fashion to repeatedly create resilient futures. The prospect of AI use alters these practices, introduces new vulnerabilities and requires new approaches.

Paper long abstract

Critical information infrastructures have become vital systems for the continuous provision of essential services that enable a range of societal routines. The resilience of these sociotechnical systems (i.e., organizations and the technologies they operate) and the services they provide however, are routinely challenged by changes in the organization, emerging technologies, outside threats and environmental conditions.

The contribution to the panel focuses on the anticipation and repair practices of critical information infrastructure companies (e.g., internet exchange point operators, cyber defense center, telecommunication services), institutional actors that support them, security and safety standards as well as regulations. Their practices are organized in a cyclical fashion in order to bring forth and maintain the resilient futures of critical information infrastructures. The contribution also explores the implications of looming AI implementation in high-risk systems, like critical infrastructure, in spite of attempts to prevent the implications with proper regulation. AI introduces new anticipatory practices that are in need of recurring sociotechnical repairs (e.g., aligning, fine-tuning, retraining AI). Especially for highly complex and interdependent systems with a constantly changing environment, like critical information infrastructures, these new AI practices are prone to introduce vulnerabilities and require new approaches to address them.

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Paper short abstract

Predictive Maintenance (PdM) promises to automatize industrial repair, yet its adoption remains uneven. This paper examines the innovation promise of PdM, focusing on data infrastructures, neglected worker expertise, and its embeddedness in future imaginaries.

Paper long abstract

Predictive Maintenance (PdM) has long been heralded as a cornerstone of industrial digitalization, promising to facilitate repair by initiating interventions before breakdowns occur. Yet, despite its conceptual appeal, widespread adoption has faltered: PdM oftentimes seems to be overly complex, unprofitable or unmanageable. The recent proliferation of standardized data infrastructures, industrial platforms, and most recently agentic AI systems has reignited interest in PdM. Are these the missing pieces for its final “breakthrough”?

This paper examines the innovation promise of PdM through three interconnected lenses: infrastructural foundations, datafication of knowledge and work, as well as its embeddedness in future imaginaries.

First, PdM is a method of repair that heavily relies on the integration of heterogeneous data. Current efforts in industrial platformization try to enable standardized aggregation and analysis of data across organizations, but also introduce new dependencies and vulnerabilities.

Second, PdM depends on neglected worker expertise: While maintenance is framed as a data-driven, autonomous process, it often builds on tacit knowledge of workers. How do these infrastructural and organizational aspects shape the possibilities and limits of automated repair?

Third, I conceptualize PdM as a fictional expectation (Beckert 2016). It embodies visions of seamless, efficient, but also sustainable industrial futures. By analyzing how these are constructed and contested, the paper asks: Whose futures does PdM enact, and what ambiguities and alternatives are downplayed or obscured?

As a specific site of sociotechnical transformation that aims on automatizing repair, I argue, PdM underlines how collective imaginaries of digitalization reconfigure organizational practices and redistribute expertise.

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Paper short abstract

This study examines how repair practices reshape organizational roles in Repair Cafés, community-based repair organizations, where boundaries between volunteers, participants, and other actors become fluid through collaborative repair.

Paper long abstract

Repair Cafés operate as community-based organizations that coordinate volunteers, participants, tools, and repair activities through recurring events and shared practices. Yet less attention has been paid to how repair practices themselves shape the internal organization of such initiatives and the relations between actors involved in repair. This study examines how repair practices relate to organizational dynamics within Repair Cafés.

The study combines interviews and field observations conducted in 6 Repair Cafés in Bavaria, Germany and adopts a grounded theory approach to examine how repair practices and interactions among actors shape organizational dynamics in practice.

Preliminary findings suggest that Repair Cafés typically organize repair around a distinction between volunteers who repair items and participants who bring broken objects. However, repair interactions frequently unsettle this distinction and redistribute expertise among actors involved in the repair process. In practice, repair often unfolds collaboratively, blurring boundaries between those who repair technologies and those who use them. These interactions shape how participation and roles are organized and contribute to the formation of specific organizational arrangements within Repair Cafés. The study argues that repair practices not only restore broken objects but can also reorganize relationships between actors within sociotechnical settings, highlighting how everyday repair practices can generate subtle forms of organizational change.

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Paper short abstract

We present our sociological concept of repair for the empirical study of technology use in work contexts, illustrated by examples of industrial and care robotics.

Paper long abstract

Repair practices have been a recurring concern within Science and Technology Studies over recent decades. Much of this work has focused on the repair of technical devices (see, for example, Graham and Thrift 2007; Orr 1996; Suchman 1987; Schubert 2018; Jarzabkowski and Pinch 2013). By contrast, in our research on the use of collaborative robots in care facilities and industrial manufacturing, we are concerned less with the repair of discrete artefacts than with the repair of entire sociotechnical workflows. We use the term repair to describe systematic ways of dealing with disruptions that arise as blockages within originally scripted sequences of action and that, in turn, compromise the achievement of the practical goal of a particular work activity.

Our approach is particularly suited to the sociological investigation of technology integration and the associated transformations of work processes. Our concept of repair draws attention to the additional work processes that may arise for employees when new technologies are introduced and when sociotechnical scripts (Akrich 1992) need to be repaired in order to accomplish action goals.

In the presentation, we illustrate our concept of repair through several detailed empirical case studies (30+ interviews) of robot deployments in industrial manufacturing and nursing homes. Particular emphasis is placed on abstracting typical sequences of repair practices. In connection with the concept of distributed agency (Schulz-Schaeffer et al. 2024), we use this framework to examine more closely which sociotechnical groups of actors are involved in the respective stages of repair.

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Paper short abstract

This paper argues that "repairing"is essential for maintaining operational flow amidst digital transformation in waste management. The authors demonstrate that workers actively restore order and meaning through sociomaterial practices to counter the uncertainties introduced by new digital tools.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the role of human-technology interactions in the digital transformation of everyday waste work, questioning the idea of ready-to-use technology and examining what is needed to make work flow. Based on ethnographic field research in two waste management companies in Germany, we analyze the intersections between the lived experiences of waste workers and the material forms of digitalization. More specifically, we ask how digitalization is accomplished through everyday sociomaterial work practices. In an era of increasingly digitalized waste work, we argue that it is repairing which ensures that waste work flows. We identified repair practices that can help us understand how the observed interactive adaptations and adjustments of activities serve to restore a sense of order and meaning (i.e. care for technologies, workflows, and people) in contexts of novel uncertainties associated with the introduction of digital technologies. We suggest that looking at human-technology interactions from an ethnographic perspective and through a practice theoretical lens offers unique insights into processes of organizational transformation involving digital technologies. Our approach provides a methodological and theoretical framework for revealing otherwise invisible work and disenchanting innovation as, in practice, a disruptive event.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how ‘intelligent algorithmic machines’ work in dementia care through the analytical lens of repair work. Drawing on an ethnographic study, the analysis shows how care workers sustain an AI-based telemonitoring system through practices of calibration, workarounds and coordination.

Paper long abstract

Research in STS has increasingly emphasised repair as a generative practice through which sociotechnical systems are maintained (Jackson, 2014). Recent studies have highlighted the human labour required to sustain algorithmic systems (Bailey et al., 2020) and their intrinsic fragility, which becomes visible when these systems fail (Pink et al., 2018). As a result, these systems rely on continuous practices of repair to remain compatible with situated clinical practices (Schwennesen, 2019). Building on these perspectives, this paper proposes repair work as an analytical lens to examine how ‘intelligent algorithmic machines’ operate in dementia care settings.

Drawing on an ethnographic study part of the broader research project ANTICIPATE, the paper examines the invisible work required to align an AI-based telemonitoring system, Ancelia, with nighttime care practices in a dementia unit. The analysis identifies three forms of repair. First, repair occurs when digital infrastructure fails, requiring professional caregivers to replace the telemonitoring system with embodied vigilance and analogue corridor monitoring. Second, repair involves continuously adjusting alarm parameters to reduce false triggers and better reflect residents’ autonomy. Third, repair arises when care workers adapt the prescribed use of technology, such as converting a mobile tablet into a fixed workstation to meet the material demands of bodily care. Rather than simply restoring functionality, repair emerges as the process through which care workers articulate automated monitoring with organisational routines and the embodied needs of residents. Focusing on repair reveals that artificial intelligence in care is sustained through ongoing practices of calibration, workarounds, and coordination.

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Paper short abstract

Using Scotland’s Key Information Summary, this study theorizes how information infrastructures evolve over time, with formal workarounds extending them to new settings and user-driven repair work enabling adoption in line with evolving expectations for integrating health and care providers.

Paper long abstract

Background:

Digital technologies such as summary care records aim to support collaborative work by enabling professionals to coordinate care and integrate fragmented health and social care services. However, adoption varies across settings, with users developing workarounds to meet local information needs. In Scotland, the Key Information Summary (KIS) has been used for over 13 years to share key patient information from General Practices (GPs) with other health and care providers for Future Care Planning. Using KIS as a case study, this research examines how workarounds and adoption strategies have shaped the evolution of regional information infrastructures integrating health and social care providers.

Method:

This multi-sited ethnographic study examined KIS adoption across health and care settings. Data collection included interviews with users, implementers, and vendors; analysis of policy documents and user guides; and observations of multidisciplinary meetings and technology use. Analysis combined deductive coding using the Technology–People–Organization–Macroenvironment framework with inductive application of Science and Technology Studies concepts to examine local adaptation.

Results:

Data comprised 54 interviews, 59 documents, two websites, and 20 hours of observation (April 2024–March 2025). Adoption strategies varied over time due to misalignments between system design, evolving expectations of integrated care, and national initiatives during COVID-19. Formal workarounds extended the healthcare-centric infrastructure into non-clinical settings, while informal user-driven repair practices supported ongoing adaptation.

Conclusion:

Regional information infrastructures evolve incrementally as they become embedded in local practices. Workarounds and user-driven repair practices play a key role in sustaining and expanding these infrastructures over time.