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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.