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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.