Breakdown, Maintenance, and Repair

Summary

Breakdown, maintenance, and repair have emerged as crucial areas of study in science and technology studies (STS), and associated disciplines. Complementing and challenging the focus on production and innovation, studies of breakdown, maintenance and repair draw attention to the often-invisible practices that keep socio-technical systems working, and socio-material worlds together. These quotidian practices, far from being static, are instead sites of creativity and change.

At the core of this scholarship is the question of breakdown. This moment is crucial, as it is then where the workings of complex socio-technical systems are made visible, and where what is understood as normal and stable is temporarily overturned. However, and the relevance of breakdown notwithstanding, recent contributions have emphasized the importance of practices that keep things together before breakdown and after repair through notions such as fragility.

Shared in approaches to breakdown and fragility is an increased attention to labor and care. This implies a critical analysis of maintenance and repair, understood as practices that are not mutually exclusive, but are nevertheless distinct, and that operate together in sustaining socio-technical systems, and the orders and forms of power they enable. Maintenance in this scholarship can be understood as an ongoing achievement that keeps a world in constant change together. Conversely, repair is thought of as a concrete set of practices that emerge in response to breakdown, and that seek to either restore order or fashion a new one.

Recently, this scholarship has turned to notions such as care or the idea of reparative practices and politics. These become evermore important in a context of deepening crises that shape the contemporary moment, and point to ways to go beyond it. At the same time, they suggest that there might be limits to maintenance and repair, which might shape this field in the near future.