Taller Escuela Diseño: Ignaz Strebel // Repair, maintenance and urban assemblage

[Martin Tironi]

Estimados.

Ignaz strebel de la Universidad de ETH Zürich dará una conferencia/taller el próximo Miércoles 21 de enero a las 13h en la Escuela de Diseño (Salón Sergio Larraín, El Comendador 1916).

Su exposición Repair, maintenance and urban assemblage, tiene por objetivo explorar las articulaciones entre infraestructuras urbanas y el universo invisible de la mantención. Interesa discutir como estas actividades de reparación y mantención lejos de constituir actividades mecánicas o pasivas, configuran verdaderos ensamblajes socioténicos.

Abajo copio el Abstract y el Afiche oficial

La invitación es abierta.

Saludos cordiales

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Martin Tironi, PhD
Escuela de Diseño
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
El Comendador 1916, Providencia, Santiago.
tel. + 56 2 23545689

Abstract

My contribution, offers a video ethnography of how distinctions, distributions, and asymmetries emerge in the course and as part of building maintenance work in housing. I propose to study distinctive courses of repair work as an assembling process of constitutive character, which determines the kinds of actors, problems/solutions, and relationships involved – each time anew. 

In particular, the contribution examines the trial-and-error character of repair work, its tricky trajectories and transient objects (given the manifestly provisional character of any repair, contingent upon the unfolding situation, until any next potential problem). 

Instances of repair work will be examined on the basis of video recordings (e.g., the repair of a slow running hot water tap, the replacement of a heating rod of a stove, the repair of a card reader of a washing machine). In each case, the participants’ work of assembling repair will be examined, where its “assembling” is understood as the joint, tentatively pragmatic and mutually elaborating definition of the matter repaired or to be repaired, the means mobilized and the members involved. 

In contrast to received notions of repair, the contribution thus focuses on the situated achievement of repair work as an assembling process. In so doing, it draws not only upon previous video-based studies of “situated actions” (cf. Suchman 2007) and ethnomethodological studies of work (cf. Lynch 2014), but it also contributes to give a new spin to actor-network “sensibilities” (Mol 2010) in housing studies and urban ethnography, if not STS more broadly (cf. also Graham & Thrift 2007; Jackson 2014; Strebel, Sormani and Bovet forthcoming).

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