[Themaintainers] CfP Workshop: Histories of Technology’s Persistence: Repair, Reuse and Disposal

[Stefan Krebs]

Call for papers
*Histories of Technology’s Persistence: Repair, Reuse and Disposal*
Workshop at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History 
(C2DH), University of Luxembourg
7-8 December 2018
Submission deadline: 2 July 2018

The everyday use of technology involves practices of maintenance and 
repair but also raises questions of reuse and removal, dismantling and 
disposal. According to Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift (2007: 19), 
repair and maintenance constitute “the engine room of modern economies 
and societies”. The current “maintainers network” (Russell/Vinsel 2018) 
argues for an emphasis on maintenance instead of the traditional focus 
on invention and innovation in the field of history of technology. 
Indeed, we still know surprisingly little about the history of repair, 
reuse and disposal practices. In his plea for a history of 
“technology-in-use”, David Edgerton (2008: 81) summarised: 
“Unfortunately we are not in a position to give an overview of the main 
trends in the history of maintenance and repair. Has maintenance as a 
proportion of output gone up or down? Where there has been a trade-off 
between initial cost and maintenance, what have producers and consumers 
gone for?” We still lack answers to these questions, which is why we are 
organising a workshop to bring together historians of maintenance and 
repair.

Furthermore, we want to combine our focus on maintenance and repair with 
issues of reuse, dismantling and disposal. Repair, reuse and removal are 
closely interlinked phenomena related to the lives and persistence of 
technologies, and they go beyond the question of innovation: When 
technical artefacts become old and outworn, decisions have to be taken 
as to whether it is necessary, worthwhile or possible to maintain and 
repair them, to reuse or dismantle them for different purposes, or to 
get rid of them. And these decisions depend among other factors on the 
availability of second-hand markets, repair infrastructures and 
dismantling or disposal facilities. This is why cultures of repair 
should be studied with regard to the life span of technical artefacts 
and their possible “second” or “third lives” and “afterlives” 
(Krebs/Schabacher/Weber 2018). Steve Jackson recently argued for “broken 
world thinking”: Historians of technology should take “erosion, 
breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as 
(...) starting points” for their research and narratives (Jackson 2014: 
221). In a similar vein, but with an emphasis on technology’s 
persistence, we would like to stress the long lives of old technologies 
whose form and duration has been shaped by maintenance, repair, reuse 
and disposal infrastructures, by their availability or absence, and by 
the related economies of waste, recycling and reuse. It is generally 
assumed that practices of repair and reuse have gradually declined along 
with the rise of 20th-century mass production, mass consumption and 
throw-away societies. However, it is safe to argue that maintenance and 
repair have not become obsolete in modern consumer societies. For one, 
production and infrastructure facilities are in constant need of 
maintenance to keep them running. And even the spread of new consumer 
technologies such as automobiles, television sets and household 
appliances has greatly depended on maintenance and repair services as 
well as second-hand markets and refurbishment shops 
(Krebs/Schabacher/Weber 2018). Moreover, while cultures of repair have 
declined in certain areas, they have thrived in others, as can be seen 
by the post-war “do-it-yourself” and the current “iFixit” movements. 
Seen from a global perspective, repair and reuse markets have not 
disappeared, but have been outsourced – along with toxic waste disposal 
and recycling practices – to regions far away from the places of 
technologies’ first-time usage.

In short, the aim of our international workshop is to bring together the 
growing scholarship in the history of repair, reuse, dismantling and 
disposal. Some of the questions we would like to address are:

-    What can we learn from microhistories of repair, reuse and waste 
disposal? And from a macrohistorical perspective: How have the economies 
of repair, reuse and removal changed over time?
-    What links can be identified between the rise and decline of 
maintenance and disposal systems and societal developments? For 
instance, how has the governance of maintenance and disposal changed (or 
not) between pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial societies?
-    What role has maintenance played in the development and momentum of 
technical infrastructures and large technological systems?
-    Who are the agents and experts of maintenance, reuse and disposal, 
and what socio-technical positions do they hold?
-    How have the supply and pricing of spare parts, the repairability 
of technical designs, legal questions of maintenance and warranty, as 
well as disposal requirements changed over time? What role have 
standards and regulations played in shaping maintenance and disposal 
regimes?
-    What is the role of a historiography of maintenance, repair, reuse 
and waste disposal? Should historians contribute to the current repair 
movement and in what ways might they contribute to a more sustainable world?

Travel and accommodation costs of invited workshop participants will be 
covered by the C2DH.

The workshop will be based on pre-circulated papers (approx. 4,000 
words; deadline 16 November 2018). Workshop contributions will be 
published in an edited volume (print and open access ebook).

Please send proposals (350 words) to stefan.krebs at uni.lu; deadline 2 
July 2018.

Organisers: Stefan Krebs (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital 
History), Heike Weber (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
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