[Themaintainers] the maintainers: introduction

[Boyce, Angie Marlene]

>>When you first post to the list, I encourage you to introduce yourself and your work, to say what interests you about "maintenance" writ large and how it might connect to your current and future projects, and also to point us to existing works that connect to our theme.

?Hi Maintainers,

My name is Angie, and I am currently a postdoc at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.  My work is on the infrastructure of the US public health system and its capacity to detect and respond to problems, focusing more specifically on foodborne, zoonotic, and vector-borne diseases.??  I use archival and ethnographic methods in my work.

I'm so excited to be part of this conversation about maintenance with you all.  It became an emergent interest for me when I was doing my dissertation fieldwork on foodborne disease outbreak surveillance, where maintenance work on the surveillance system constituted the bulk of the day-to-day operations of the surveillance system, making change/adaptation extremely difficult.  Maintenance could be an interesting way to think about a current project, which is on multi-sector coordination and ethical dilemmas associated with regulating risky Salmonella-infected pet turtles; despite the fact that there is a federal ban on these creatures, outbreaks still occur, and the ban itself continues to be contested by the turtle industry, raising questions about how we can "maintain" standards over time.  Also, I'm hoping to make maintenance a more central part of a new project on emergent/resurgent vector-borne diseases, where there is a tension between the need to maintain consistent surveillance systems, the sporadic nature of epidemics/outbreaks, and a volatile policy/funding environment.

One thing I'm very interested to talk with others about is, what the theme of maintenance calls our attention to, that standards/standardization or infrastructure don't quite capture.

I'd potentially be interested in a SHOT roundtable, I haven't been to the conference before but would love to go, and look forward to meeting those of you on this list that I haven't yet.

Best,
Angie

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