Repairing Infrastructures

The Maintenance of Materiality and Power

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$40.00 US
On sale Oct 13, 2020 | 216 Pages | 978-0-262-53970-8
An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life.

Infrastructures—communication, food, transportation, energy, and information—are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them. Repair can encompass not only the kind of work we most commonly associate with the term but also any set of practices aimed at restoring a sense of normalcy or credibility to the places and institutions we inhabit in everyday life.

From cases as diverse as the repair of building systems on a university campus, a conflict over retrofitting a bridge while protecting murals painted on it, and the global challenge posed by climate change, Henke and Sims assemble a range of examples to illustrate key conceptual points about the role of repair. They show that repair is an essential if often overlooked aspect of understanding the broader impact and politics of infrastructures. Understanding repair helps us better understand infrastructures and the scope of their influence on our lives.

Acknowledgements
Chapter One. Introduction: A Toolkit for Understanding Infrastructure and Repair
Chapter Two. Cold Offices and Hot Airplanes: Local Negotiations Over Repair
Chapter Three. Bridging Scales: The Local Negotiation of Systemic Repair
Chapter Four. From Versailles to Armageddon: Building and Maintaining the Infrastructural State
Chapter Five. Confronting the Anthropocene: Reflexive Repair in an Age of Global Infrastructures
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Christopher R. Henke is Associate Professor of Sociology at Colgate University. He is the author of Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power (MIT Press).

Benjamin Sims is a sociologist and scientist with the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

About

An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life.

Infrastructures—communication, food, transportation, energy, and information—are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them. Repair can encompass not only the kind of work we most commonly associate with the term but also any set of practices aimed at restoring a sense of normalcy or credibility to the places and institutions we inhabit in everyday life.

From cases as diverse as the repair of building systems on a university campus, a conflict over retrofitting a bridge while protecting murals painted on it, and the global challenge posed by climate change, Henke and Sims assemble a range of examples to illustrate key conceptual points about the role of repair. They show that repair is an essential if often overlooked aspect of understanding the broader impact and politics of infrastructures. Understanding repair helps us better understand infrastructures and the scope of their influence on our lives.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Chapter One. Introduction: A Toolkit for Understanding Infrastructure and Repair
Chapter Two. Cold Offices and Hot Airplanes: Local Negotiations Over Repair
Chapter Three. Bridging Scales: The Local Negotiation of Systemic Repair
Chapter Four. From Versailles to Armageddon: Building and Maintaining the Infrastructural State
Chapter Five. Confronting the Anthropocene: Reflexive Repair in an Age of Global Infrastructures
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author

Christopher R. Henke is Associate Professor of Sociology at Colgate University. He is the author of Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power (MIT Press).

Benjamin Sims is a sociologist and scientist with the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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