[EASST-Eurograd] EASST 2026 CFA Panel P224: Repair as Future-Making: Enacting Sociotechnical Change in Organizations
Wiggert, Kevin via Eurograd
Dear colleagues,
I want to promote our panel at the coming EASST conference in Krakow. Together with Diana Ayeh, Alena Bleicher, Sabine Biedermann Camposano and Tim Clausnitzer we want to ask the question on “Repair as Future-Making? Enacting Sociotechnical Change in Organizations”. Below you can find the abstract:
“In an increasingly digitized world characterized by malfunction, breakdown, and disruption, socio-technical futures cannot be envisioned without considering repair. Research on human–technology interactions has long highlighted the significance repair has for restoring functionality but also for opening up possibilities for newness, creativity, and improvisation (e.g. Jackson 2014, Graham & Thrift 2007, Orr 1996; Suchman 1987, Schubert 2019). Recent studies on digital and automation technologies in organizations further shed light on the often invisible work of data care and the complex sociotechnical dynamics their implementation entails — processes that frequently involve repair (e.g. Pink et al 2022; Suchman 1987). Digital transformation, in this sense, unfolds through continuous cycles of failure, adaption, and repair.
This panel invites contributions approaching digitization and related changes in organizations though the lens of how repair both shapes and is shaped by sociotechnical systems and human-non-human interactions. We particularly welcome contributions that explore material repair of objects and infrastructures, but also repair of workflows, interactions, and relations among diverse actors and/or actants. We encourage both theoretical contributions that reflect on and advance the concept of repair, and empirical studies that explore how, by whom, and in what ways repair practices contribute to imagining and enacting futures considered to be worth living in.
Contributions may include, but are not limited to, the following questions:
- How can repair be understood not merely as fixing but as a creative and generative act that shapes possible futures?
- How do digitalization and automation technologies redefine repair practices, and who performs repair?
- How do workers integrate repair practices amid organizational processes of digital transformation and innovation?
- How are repair and organizational change related?
- In what ways can attention to repair practices inform the design, governance, and sustainability of technological systems and infrastructures?”
Submit your abstract via this link: https://easst.net/conference/easst2026/programme/#18274
Submission Deadline: 28th February 2028.
We are looking forward to your submissions and hope for a great and insightful panel and conference in September.
Best regards
Kevin Wiggert