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Short abstract

Approaching crisis as a socio-technical mode of observation, this paper analyses professional cleaning during Covid-19. It argues that resilient futures are built on mundane infrastructures and invisible labour obscured by crisis framings.

Long abstract

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that 'crisis' serves not only as a description of exceptional events, but also as a powerful observational framework that organises knowledge, responsibility and intervention. This paper argues that crisis framings highlight not only urgency and disruption, but also systematically obscure continuous, mundane and infrastructural forms of labour and vulnerability. Focusing on professional cleaning work during the Covid-19 pandemic, the paper examines how crisis observation produces epistemic blind spots that shape what counts as care, relevance, and resilience.

Empirically, the paper draws on qualitative research conducted within the project "Corona and Care". The analysis examines how cleaning was mobilised as a hygienic infrastructure essential to pandemic management, while remaining excluded from dominant narratives of care, heroism, and recovery. Crisis discourse foregrounded technologies of disinfection, risk management, and organisational control, while marginalising the gendered and racialised labour relations that sustained these infrastructures. Rather than constituting a rupture, the pandemic intensified existing regimes of invisibility and precarisation embedded in everyday practices of maintenance.

Conceptually, the paper approaches crisis as a socio-technical mode of observation that stabilises particular futures while foreclosing others. From this perspective, resilience does not emerge from spectacular innovation or emergency response, but from the ongoing reproduction of fragile infrastructures and undervalued work. Cleaning thus functions as a pivotal domain in which pledges of resilience are contingent upon forms of labour that are systemically unacknowledged. The paper contributes to STS debates on crisis, resilience, and futures by arguing for perspectives that move beyond “the now” of emergency.