| Beschreibung: |
Alongside the exchange of ideas, expertise, and skills within or between disciplines, the shared use of research instruments and infrastructures is characteristic of research collaborations. Particularly in Big Science efforts, sharing the burden of financing, building, and maintaining central research instruments such as telescopes or detectors is a key feature of collaboration that sustains it in the long run. Yet also smaller-scale or more informally organized research collaboration typically depends on some kind of communal infrastructure, be it research facilities, data repositories, or software applications, which need to be cared for, curated, and maintained. Whereas the maintenance of instruments and facilities has traditionally been delegated to ‘invisible technicians’ (Shapin), collaborative research tends to blur the boundaries between ‘technical’ and ‘scientific’ work, and the associated roles and expertise. Far from being invisible, instruments and infrastructures often become the focal point of collaborators’ attention, as technologies’ affordances and inherent temporalities shape epistemic practices in non-trivial ways. While maintenance work may be less recognized in public, it may at times be experienced as more immediately rewarding, innovative and creative than ‘scientific’ work. Foregrounding the central role of shared instruments and infrastructures, we aim to explore the status and appeal of maintenance work in collaborative research and its relation to other notions such as care, repair and ‘infrastructuring’. We invite empirical contributions addressing one or more of the following questions: - How are collectively shared infrastructures and instruments maintained and cared for in collaborative work? What kinds of work are considered to be (mere) maintenance?
- How is maintenance work embedded in, and how does it shape the temporal structures and dimensions of collaborative research?
- How is maintenance and infrastructuring work distributed and recognized in research collaborations? What internal distinctions and boundaries are constructed or overcome in this process?
- How are maintenance work, the expertise it requires, and the actors performing it made invisible and/or visible in research collaborations? Does the figure of the ‘invisible technician’ still play a role?
- How can we define ‘infrastructuring’ in relation to maintenance? Are these distinct kinds of activities? If so, what other kinds of work, actors, and valuations does infrastructuring involve?
- How does maintenance sustain conservation and innovation of collaborative infrastructures and instruments? Are there tensions and trade-offs between durability and innovation? In what ways can maintenance work be creative?
- Which care practices and affective relations occur in maintenance work? How do researchers identify with and valorize this work?
- How does the maintenance of infrastructures and instruments reflect and shape organizational practices in research collaborations?
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