[Themaintainers] CFP for Maintainers II, April 6-8, 2017

[Lee Vinsel]

Dear Maintainers,

The list has been mostly inactive over the summer, but we are hoping it
will pick up in the coming weeks. Andy Russell and I be bringing a number
of opportunities to your attention, and we'd love to hear any ideas you
have or opportunities you know of, on or off list.

To get things going, here is the CFP for The Maintainers II--copied below
for your convenience: http://themaintainers.org/maintainers-ii-cfp/

Best to all,

Lee

*Call for Papers*

*Maintainers II: Labor, Technology, and Social Orders*

*April 6-8, 2017*



We invite submissions and proposals for a conference called “The
Maintainers II: Labor, Technology, and Social Orders,” to be hosted at
Stevens Institute of Technology on April 6-8, 2017.  This meeting will
build upon the discussions and community formed in the wake of activities
in 2016, including the first Maintainers Conference at Stevens in 2016
<http://themaintainers.org/program/>, an article that appeared in Aeon
<https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more>,
and blogs and discussions launched at *http://themaintainers.org/blog/
<http://themaintainers.org/blog/>*.



Recent scholarship on technology has too often fetishized material things
and their thinginess, and excluded any consideration of the humans who make
those things work. The purpose of Maintainers II is to write humans back
into stories of technology, as a way to highlight social inequalities,
racial and ethnic disparities, and the structural maldistribution of the
fruits of technological progress.



To do so, we build on a long tradition of the study of maintenance that
spreads across disciplines, from historians such as Ruth Schwartz Cowan and
David Edgerton to social scientists such as Lucy Suchman and Craig Henke.
In the first Maintainers conference in 2016, scholars responded to a call
for papers that positioned maintenance and Maintainers against prevailing
discourses of innovation and Innovators.  In this second conference, we are
emphasizing the theme of labor and laborers, in an effort to establish the
study of maintenance framed on its own terms, as we have seen in recent
work by scholars such as Jerôme Denis and David Pontille
<http://www.csi.mines-paristech.fr/blog/?p=1181&lang=en>.



We are especially interested in proposals that examine the human dimensions
of infrastructures, technological systems, and everyday life.  We are also
particularly interested in presentations from practitioners of maintenance
and repair—so if you have a Maintainer in your life who has something that
he or she really wants to say, please send them our way. We welcome
proposals for individual papers as well as full sessions, and proposals for
anything that one wouldn’t usually see at an academic meeting (video,
interactive sessions, interpretive dances, etc) also would be most welcome.
All proposals are welcome, including those that engage the following ideas:



- Case studies of specific groups of maintainers

- Labor organizations around maintenance and repair work

- The maintenance and conservation of repressive regimes (such as the
infrastructure of Jim Crow segregation)

- Methodologies for studying maintenance and repair

- The fit between maintenance, maintainers, and traditional left-right,
progressive vs. conservative political distinctions

- Connections between failures, accidents, and (deferred or denied)
maintenance

- Deterioration, decay, disruption, and breakdown

- Ingenuity and improvisation as key aspects of maintenance

- Studies grounded either outside the United States or before the 1980s



Review of proposals will begin on *Thursday December 1*. Proposals should
include a topic title, a description of roughly 300 words, and a current
curriculum vita. Please submit questions to the conference organizers, Lee
Vinsel (Stevens Institute of Technology – lee.vinsel at gmail.com) and Andrew
Russell (SUNY Polytechnic Institute – arussell at arussell.org). Completed
proposals should be submitted to themaintainersnetwork at gmail.com.




-- 
Assistant Professor
Program on Science and Technology Studies
College of Arts and Letters
Stevens Institute of Technology
Hoboken, NJ 07030
leevinsel.com
Twitter: @STS_News
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