[Themaintainers] Talk: Carlos Cuevas-Garcia "Meeting Maintenance and Innovation Halfway: Thinking with Sewer Inspection Robots" Maintenance Philosophy Technology SIG (June 11th 18-1915 UTC+1)

[mark young]

Dear all,

We’re pleased to announce the next session of the SPT Maintenance and
Philosophy of Technology SIG on Thursday 11th June. In this session, we’re
excited to welcome Carlos Cuevas-Garcia who’ll be sharing his research on
the use of robotics for infrastructure maintenance. The talk looks at
research European initiatives to develop sewer inspection robots as a way
to question the role that innovation currently occupies in maintenance and
repair studies. Carlos’ talk will present follow-up research to a paper
that he published last year in *Social Studies of Science* which is open
access and available through this link:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03063127231207082

If you'd like a Zoom link for this talk, send me a quick email at
mark at markthomasyoung.net

Best,
Mark

Mark Thomas Young
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Oslo
https://uio.academia.edu/MarkThomasYoung

*Meeting Maintenance and Innovation Halfway: Thinking with Sewer Inspection
Robots*

Carlos Cuevas-Garcia (Technical University of Munich)

Thursday June 11th 18-1915 UTC +1

*Abstract:* Scholarship on maintenance and repair tends to take an
antagonistic relation to innovation, innovation talk, and innovation
studies. But what happens when ambitious research and innovation policies
turn their gaze on maintenance and repair as a prominent use case for
emerging technologies such as robotics? Since the early 2010s, the European
Commission has funded numerous robotics projects focused on the inspection
and maintenance of large physical infrastructures such as oil and gas,
nuclear and renewable energy, transport, and water. A report from the AI,
Data and Robotics Association (ADRA) suggests that infrastructure
inspection and maintenance is one of the four main market segments of
European robotics alongside agriculture, healthcare, and manufacturing. How
can the deployment of these policies and their outcomes be explored without
seeing them neither as another case study of innovation nor as another case
study of maintenance? By examining diverse initiatives on inspection and
maintenance robotics, some started by public water authorities and others
by the unit dedicated to robotics from the European Commission, this talk
will introduce the notion of “maintenance-innovation regimes:”
Sociotechnical arrangements that define and control how maintenance,
innovation, and understandings of sociomaterial fragility and how to
address it shape each other in specific contexts.

(In order to avoid confusion regarding the timing of the talks - the
following table clarifies when the talks begin in different locations:

New York:         13:00
San Francisco: 10:00
London:            18:00
Amsterdam:      19:00
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