Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, NJ)
Dates: April 7 - 9, 2016
Location: Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ
Stevens Institute of Technology is hosting a conference titled "The Maintainers" on April 7-9, 2016. The conference will feature over 40 presentations from scholars in a variety of fields, including academic historians and social scientists, as well as artists, activists, and engineers. All share an interest in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world.
Presentations will cover a wide variety of technologies and practices, including software, spaceflight, trolleys, meteorology, digital archives, and the politics of funding for infrastructure.
Conference keynote speaker: Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Professor Emerita in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of several books, including the path-breaking More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technologies from the Hearth to the Microwave.
=>For more information, including a draft program and registration information, please click here.
This conference is sponsored by the College of Arts & Letters at Stevens Institute of Technology.
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DRAFT PROGRAM
(version of February 21, 2016)
THURSDAY APRIL 7
All Thursday sessions are in the Bissinger Room, 4th Floor, Howe Center, Stevens Institute of Technology
Thursday Opening Plenary: What is Maintenance & Why Does it Matter?
3-4:30 pm
Scott Knowles, Drexel University
“Maintenance Deferred: Slow Disaster and the Politics of Infrastructural Decay”
Zachary Pirtle, NASA
“What Do Maintainers Know and How Do They Know It?: Insights from Exploration Systems Development”
Lara Houston, Cornell University
“Unsettled repair tools: The death of the J.A.F. Box”
Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina
“An Ethics of Care for Infrastructural Repair”
Thursday Keynote: 4:30-5:45 pm
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, University of Pennsylvania
"Maintaining Gender with Technology"
FRIDAY APRIL 8
All Friday sessions are in the Bissinger Room, 4th Floor, Howe Center, Stevens Institute of Technology
Friday 1: Legacies of the Nineteenth Century
8:45-10 am
Ann Greene, University of Pennsylvania
"Success as 'Failure': Historians, Engineers, and Maintaining the Erie Canal"
Deepak Malghan, Indian Institute of Management
“Two Cultures and the Efficiency Revolution: The Connected Histories of Innovation and Maintenance”
John Laurence Busch, Independent Scholar
“Maintaining Innovators or Innovating Maintainers?: Revolutionaries vs. Reactionaries in the 19th Century Maritime World”
Nicholas O’Brien, Stevens Institute of Technology
“The Trolley”
Friday 2: Theory, Method, Practice
10:30-11:45 am
Ellen Foster, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
“Systems of Maintenance: Feminist Theory and Method”
Juris Milestone, Temple University
“Anthropologist as Tribologist”
Padraig Murphy, Dublin City University
“Reprising the Third Way: a Middling Proposal”
Matt Thomas, Kirkwood Community College
"Against Innovative Scholarship: The Monastic, Benedict, and Wiseian Options"
Friday 3: Clones, Communists, Culture
12-1:15 pm
Tiago Saraiva, Drexel University
“Cloning as Maintenance: Oranges, Genetics, and Segregated Democracy in California and South Africa”
Philip Scranton, Rutgers University
“Fixing Holes in the Plan: Maintenance and Repair in Communist Europe, 1945-1970”
Lee Vinsel, Stevens Institute of Technology
“The Stories We Tell, or, Mary Poppins, Maintainer”
Misha Rabinovich and Caitlin Foley, UMass Lowell
“Maintenance Art and Extreme Sharing”
Break: 1:15-2:15 pm
Friday 4: People and Networks
2:15-3:30 pm
Roger Turner, Dickinson College
“Aviation Meteorology: How Flight Safety depends upon the Repetitious Production of Constantly Expiring Knowledge”
Heidi Voskuhl, University of Pennsylvania
“The Politics of Maintenance: Electricity, Socialism, and John McClane’s Tireless Fight Against Evil”
Andrew Meade McGee, University of Virginia
“The Computer Shop Around the Corner: Neighborhood PC Repair Businesses as Sites of Maintenance and Technological Dissemination”
Andrew Russell, Stevens Institute of Technology
“Maintaining the Internet”
Friday 5: Archives and Memory
4-5:15 pm
Nicholas Barron, University of New Mexico
“Archival Innovation and Maintenance: Encountering the Sublime in the American Southwest”
Patricia Galloway, University of Texas
“Archiving digital objects as maintenance: Crafting a practice”
SATURDAY APRIL 9
All Saturday sessions are in Room 222 of the Edwin A. Stevens Building, Stevens Institute of Technology
Saturday 1: Maintenance in Motion
8:45-10 am
Renee Blackburn, MIT
“Maintaining the Future: The Boston Busing Crisis in the 1970s”
Matthew Hersch, Harvard University
“Return, Repair, Refly: Spaceflight Strategies for a Resource-Limited Age”
Roger Launius, National Air and Space Museum
“A Clash of Engineering Cultures? NASA Engineers, R&D Culture, and the Space Shuttle as an Operational System”
Jim Fleming, Colby College
“Atmospheric Maintenance: Temporal and Spatial Considerations”
Saturday 2: Maintaining the Digital
10:30-11:45 am
Nathan Ensmenger, Indiana University
“When Good Software Goes Bad: The Unexpected Durability of Digital Technologies”
Stephanie Dick and Dan Volmar, Harvard University
“Maintaining the Novel: Legacy and Longevity in Microsoft Windows”
Greg Bloom, Open Referral
“The Tragedy of the Directories: Towards the Maintenance of Community Resource Data as a Digital Public Good”
Bradley Fidler, UCLA
“The Dependence of Cyberspace: Political and Technical Maintenance of Internet Resources”
Saturday 3: Maintenance in Democracies
12-1:15 pm
Alex Wellerstein, Stevens Institute of Technology
“Maintaining the Bomb: The High Price and High Stakes of Keeping the Nuclear Weapons Complex Running”
Amy Slaton, Drexel University
“Mere Maintenance: Stratified Industrial Labor and The Reproduction of Human Difference”
Patrick McCray, University of California Santa Barbara
"Maintaining a Mountain of Magical Thinking"
Kevin Brown, Carnegie Mellon University
"Environmental History and 'Maintenance': The Case of the Devils Hole Pupfish"
Break: 1:15-2:15 pm
Saturday 4: Humanity and Bureaucracy
2:15-3:30 pm
Fallon Aidoo, Harvard University
“The Right to Work on Rights-of-Way in the Age of Deregulation”
Ellan Spero, MIT
“‘A Card for everything, Miss Whittle!’ – A maintainer’s approach to the organization of academic-industrial research at the Mellon Institute for Industrial Research”
Hugh Lester, Stevens Institute of Technology
“Program Manager for Life”
Brandon Benevento, University of Connecticut
“Shaping the Future: The Political-Economic Possibility of Maintenance”
Saturday 5: The Enduring Industrial Age
4-5:15 pm
Ann Johnson, Cornell University
“Insurance as a Key Element in Risky Socio-technical Systems”
Dan Gregory, Common Capital
"That New Car Smell: Social Innovation, Maintenance, and Civil Society"
Dan Holbrook, Marshall University
“Discipline and Polish: On Wiping and Wipers”
Daniel Levinson Wilk, Fashion Institute of Technology
“Hotel Maintenance Made Easy”