Steven J. Jackson
Cornell University (USA)

"Broken World Thinking: Maintenance, Repair, Hope"

What does it mean to fix things? And how might starting from maintenance and repair – instead of design, innovation, or invention – change how we think about technology, art, and the contemporary-but-perennial problem of sustainability? This talk will draw on recent and older work in philosophy, the social sciences and technology studies to make the case for repair as a crucial but undervalued dimension in our relations with objects, ecologies, and the more-than-human worlds around us. It will also report on art projects and ethnographic research with fixing communities around the world to call out practices and forms of value widely neglected in prevailing imaginations of technology. It concludes with a word on hope, and how ongoing practices of maintenance and repair, broadly conceived, may still help us to navigate, sustain, and make meaning in and with the broken worlds around us.

Steven J. Jackson is a Professor of Information Science and Science and Technology Studies and Vice-Provost for Academic Innovation at Cornell University (USA). His work combines ethnographic, legal, humanistic, and interpretive traditions grounded in pragmatism, critical theory, and post-structuralism with an overall interest in how people build and maintain order, value and meaning in and with the worlds around them. He is fascinated by processes of breakdown, maintenance and repair as central but neglected moments in our individual and collective relationships with technology. This has led to ethnographic projects with mobile phone repair workers around the world, amateur fixer movements in Europe and North America, and to collaborative projects with interactive and new media artists. He is especially interested in places where new computing forms and practices meet the social and natural worlds, with implications for collaboration, sustainability, justice, learning and inequality. With fellow travellers in the Computing On Earth Lab and around the world, he has written extensively on problems of infrastructure, collaboration, maintenance, repair, and hope. More info and links to recent papers and projects can be found at: https://infosci.cornell.edu/content/jackson.