Originally published in Section Culture: Newsletter of the ASA Culture Section. Fall 2019. Vol. 31 Issue 2. Lara Houston At particular moments, the historically invisible work of maintenance and repair takes on a renewed importance. Today in the social sciences, maintenance and repair – as overarching themes and topics – are finding new audiences. Perhaps this is because so many taken-for-granted orders appear to be breaking down … Continue reading Roundtable: Why I study maintenance and repair

Originally published in Section Culture: Newsletter of the ASA Culture Section. Fall 2019. Vol. 31 Issue 2. Fernando Domínguez Rubio Univ. of California, San Diego Over the last few years the notions of maintenance and repair have garnered growing attention in fields like media and communication studies, anthropology, social studies of science, and urban studies. So far, however, they have not entered into debates in American cultural … Continue reading Maintenance and repair as cultural work

Originally published in Section Culture: Newsletter of the ASA Culture Section. Fall 2019. Vol. 31 Issue 2. Jérôme Denis and David Pontille Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation Georg Simmel (1971) famously pointed this out, and it is at the very centre of scholarship in epigraphy : signs are a crucial feature of urban fabric. There are basically two kinds of graphic components in the city. One the one … Continue reading With and without signs: the daily maintenance of urban orders

Originally published in Section Culture: Newsletter of the ASA Culture Section. Fall 2019. Vol. 31 Issue 2. Sarah Pink Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University. There has been a growing focus on questions of repair and maintenance across disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, including human geography, anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies (STS). Underpinning this is an acknowledgement of the incompleteness of ongoingly emergent states of things … Continue reading Broken Data

Jessica Meyerson, Senior Research Officer, Educopia Institute Andrew Russell, Dean, College of Arts & Sciences SUNY Polytechnic Institute Lee Vinsel, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Virginia Tech The Maintainers is a global research network interested in maintenance, repair, infrastructure, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world. Since we founded the network five years ago, two topics have … Continue reading The Social Aesthetics of Maintenance

Originally published in Section Culture: Newsletter of the ASA Culture Section. Summer 2019. Vol. 31 Issue 1. Kari Norgaard University of Oregon Like most environmental sociologists I’ve long been troubled by the limited view our discipline has taken of what has come to be known as “nature” and “culture.” Indeed, the notion that the experiences of ‘modern’ peoples and societies can be understood without accounting for the … Continue reading Nature, Culture and the Production of Race