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Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology
What can we learn about the nature of technology by studying practices of maintenance and repair? This volume addresses this question by bringing together scholarship from philosophers of technology working at the forefront of this emerging and exciting topic. The chapters in this volume explore how attending to maintenance and repair can challenge and complement existing ways of thinking about technology focused on use and design and introduce new philosophical perspectives on the relationship between technology, time and human practice. They examine the significance of maintenance and repair practices at different scales in relation to a diverse range of philosophical traditions and a wide...
The Care of Things
What does a coffee machine, a car, road signs, a smartphone, a cathedral, a work of art, a satellite, a bicycle, a washing machine, a bridge, a watch, a computer, the body of a prominent politician and a tractor have in common? Pretty much nothing – except for the fact that, no matter how small, large, important or insignificant something is, it rarely survives without being cared for. Every object eventually experiences wear and tear, it deteriorates, stops working or breaks down. But are we giving the care of things the recognition it deserves? A counterpoint to our modern obsession with innovation but less striking than the one-off act of restoration, the delicate act of making things l...
The Re-Use of Urban Ruins
How do urban ruins provoke their cultural revaluation? This book offers a unique sociological analysis about the social agencies of material culture and atmospheric knowledge of buildings in the making. It draws on ethnographic research in Berlin along the former Palace of the Republic, the E-Werk and the Café Moskau in order to make visible an interdisciplinary regime of design experts who have developed a professional sensorium turning the built memory of the city into an object of aesthetic inquiry.
The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels after 1968
What makes a city? What makes architecture? And, what is to be included in the discussions of architecture and the city? Attempting to answer such ambitious questions, this book starts from a city’s specificity and complexity. In response to recent debates in architectural theory around the agency and locus of critical action, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. Rather than through conceptual and ideological categorisations, it studies how architecture and criticality work within specific circumstances. Brussels, a complex city with a turbulent architectural and urban past, forms a compelling case for examining the tensions between urban politics, architectural i...
Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media
This is the first comprehensive volume to explore and engage with current trends in Geographies of Media research. It reviews how conceptualizations of mediated geographies have evolved. Followed by an examination of diverse media contexts and locales, the book illustrates key issues through the integration of theoretical and empirical case studies, and reflects on the future challenges and opportunities faced by scholars in this field. The contributions by an international team of experts in the field, address theoretical perspectives on mediated geographies, methodological challenges and opportunities posed by geographies of media, the role and significance of different media forms and org...
Mobilities, Literature, Culture
This is the first book dedicated to literary and cultural scholars’ engagement with mobilities scholarship. As such, the volume both advances new theoretical approaches to the study of culture and furthers the recent “humanities turn” in mobilities studies. The book’s scholarship is deeply informed by cultural geography’s vision of a mobilised reconceptualisation of space and place, but also by the contribution of literary scholars in articulating questions of travel, technologies of transport, (post)colonialism and migration through a close engagement with textual materials. A comprehensive introduction maps pre-histories and emerging directions of this exciting interdisciplinary endeavor while taking up the theoretical and methodological challenges of the burgeoning subfield. Contributions range across geographical and disciplinary boundaries to address questions of embodied subjectivities, mobility and the nation, geopolitics of migration, and mobilities futures.
Industrial Craft in Australia
This book is the first of its kind to investigate the ongoing significance of industrial craft in deindustrialising places such as Australia. Providing an alternative to the nostalgic trope of the redundant factory ‘craftsman’, this book introduces the intriguing and little-known trade of engineering patternmaking, where objects are brought to life through the handmade ‘originals’ required for mass production. Drawing on oral histories collected by the author, this book highlights the experiences of industrial craftspeople in Australian manufacturing, as they navigate precarious employment, retraining, gendered career pathways, creative expression and technological change. The book argues that digital fabrication technologies may modify or transform industrial craft, but should not obliterate it. Industrial craft is about more than the rudimentary production of everyday objects: it is about human creativity, material knowledge and meaningful work, and it will be key to human survival in the troubled times ahead.
Fixing Motorcycles in Post-Repair Societies
Most social science studies on automobility have focused on the production, usage, identity construction and aesthetic improvements of personal means of transportation. What happens if we shift the focus to the labour, knowledge and social relations that go into the unavoidable moments of maintenance and repair? Taking motorcycling in Romania as an ethnographic entry point, this book documents how bikers handle the inevitable moments of malfunction and breakdown. Using both mobile and sedentary research methods, the book describes the joys and troubles experienced by amateur mechanics, professional mechanics and untechnical men and women when fixing bikes.
Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds
The past decade has witnessed a remarkable resurgence in the intellectual interplay between geography and the humanities in both academic and public circles. The metaphors and concepts of geography now permeate literature, philosophy and the arts. Concepts such as space, place, landscape, mapping and territory have become pervasive as conceptual frameworks and core metaphors in recent publications by humanities scholars and well-known writers. Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds contains over twenty-five contributions from leading scholars who have engaged this vital intellectual project from various perspectives, both inside and outside of the field of geography. The book is divided into ...
Repairing Infrastructures
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...
