(Un)timely Endings: Negotiating Sociotechnical relations in their unmaking

Abstracts

Uneasy endings: pasts and futures of nuclear infrastructures in France and Austria

Pierre Delvenne, University of Liège (Spiral); with Martin Denoun and Céline Parotte

In the uncertain context of the war in Ukraine, many countries are faced with important decisions about what to do with their nuclear infrastructures, whether to repair and modernize old facilities, replace them with new ones, or continue to dismantle them. Considering “decay” as a mundane process that needs to be considered from the beginning to the end of the infrastructure life, we propose to compare and contrast the different endings of nuclear facilities in order to advance theoretical developments on decay processes and their management.

We hypothesize that the decay of nuclear infrastructures - and what is done about it - reveals socio-technical relationships between past choices and visions of the future that are otherwise black-boxed. A focus on decay management practices opens up a fertile space for thinking about technological and social futures with or without nuclear power plants. To demonstrate this, we will use semi-structured interviews, archival and document analysis, and site visits to contrast two cases of nuclear infrastructures facing their end: the reprocessing plant at La Hague in France as a future ending, and the Zwentendorf plant in Austria as a past ending. La Hague is a cornerstone of French nuclear policy; although it is threatened with closure, its inevitable end is never publicly discussed. Most importantly, it must be maintained in order to be closed. Zwentendorf was closed before it was nuclearized: it remains as a witness to a non-nuclear policy that must be maintained long after its closure.

Birth, Life, and Death of Containerships. Toward a Global Ethnography of Maritime Labour

Camelia Dewan, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo; with Elisabeth Schober and Johanna Markkula

Container ships are sociotechnical assemblages that, throughout the various stages of their life cycles, perform vital tasks within contemporary global capitalism. When the “Ever Given” got stuck inside the Suez Canal, a global spectatorship marvelled at these vessels that have recently grown so spectacularly in size. Their “charisma”, as it were, arguably stems not only from their at times astonishing dimensions, but also from the fact that the work involved in their (dis-)articulation in the world is exceedingly dangerous. Ships regularly claim the lives of the workers who build, maintain and operate, as well as recycle them. In this paper, based on collaborative ethnographic work, we foreground intersecting notions of death as they express themselves during three distinct stages of a container ship’s “life”. Shipbuilding, shipping, and ship-recycling are all processes that engage multiple landscapes dispersed across the globe. From shipyards in East and Southeast Asia, to ports dotted across the world, to shipbreaking facilities in South Asia – these sites all involve diverse sets of labourers who build, maintain, and eventually take apart these large machines, and who have to negotiate the real threat to life and limb that these machines represent. Untimely deaths, we will argue, haunt all of these work-places, figuring as one common denominator that connects these sites that are key in the (un-)making of container-carrying sea vessels today

From operational to dismantling and back again? – Generational aspects of nuclear cultural heritage

Karin Edberg, Linköping University/Tema Technology and Social Change

The Barsebäck nuclear power plant in southern Sweden ceased producing electricity in 2005 and is now in the process of dismantling. The physical infrastructure is however still largely in place and the plant still employs parts of the local workforce. The nuclear power plant therefore continues to have a significant impact on the social, economic as well as the physical landscape. At the same time, the interaction between the public and the nuclear industry (e.g. visitor activities) has decreased significantly.  Cultural heritage is understood differently depending on the stage of life to which one belongs, but is also inherited between generations. When a place changes, there is a break in that continuity. The understanding of nuclear power and its role in the local community and cultural heritage can therefore be assumed to be different for different generations. Studying these issues in a Swedish context is relevant as several decades of political focus on decommissioning currently is being replaced by a more nuclear-positive orientation. The empirical material consists of children’s drawings, individual- and group interviews with persons in different ages living and/or working in the vicinity of the NPP as well as archival material.  In this paper, we aim to create a better understanding of how the different life cycle phases of a nuclear power plant interact with different generations' perception of what is part of the local cultural heritage and how nuclear power is incorporated therein, but also what future imaginaries of the nuclear community people in different ages express. The aim is to understand how memory and heritage change over generations, but also what it is like to grow up in the shadow of an industry in transition.

Pipes, data and everything that leaks: Becoming alert to infrastructural demise

Maria Festila, University of Southern Denmark; Laura Kocksch

Alarms, alerts and warnings are infrastructural normalcy. Alerts invoke instant attention, require engaging in here-and-now materiality, and allow improvisations. Being alert means noticing differently. We present two ethnographic studies to substantiate this claim:

The first study follows district heating maintenance workers in Denmark on their search for “green water” – water that is chemically altered to be distinguishable when leaking. Maintenance work is getting increasingly supported by drone-operated thermographic cameras and data visualisations that render leaks from underground pipes visible. We reflect how data-driven alertness differs from previous reliance on vigilant citizens and workers’ first-hand experience.

The second study investigates cybersecurity practices of small and medium-sized (SMEs) companies across Denmark. SMEs often lack extensive training and monitoring apparatuses for data leaks and virus detection. Rather, they engage in mundane practices of tinkering with their surroundings to keep track of security. SMEs are not falling into short-lived alarmism (which is why they are often considered disinterested in cybersecurity), but create long-term relations to care for their IT and data.

Drawn together, the two field sites investigate practices of alertness - a state of specific material attention and relational sensitivity. When alert, we engage in fragile relations, attending to what could be ending, is in decay or decline. Thinking across our field sites engenders a situated comparison between the leaking of water and data, noticing colours and strange programs, and engaging with pipes and IT. In such a comparison lies the opportunity to further specify what it needs to notice timely endings. 

Untimely technology? attachments and detachments in the (un)making of the fast neutron nuclear reactor in France

Claire Le Renard, EDF R&D, LISIS

This paper analyses the work required to disengage from a major technological program, basing on the turbulent history of the French ‘Superphénix’ fast neutron nuclear reactor, initiated as an "industrial scale prototype" in the 1970s. Since the beginnings of nuclear power, “fast neutron” technology has been linked to a 'breeder' socio-technical imaginary (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015), involving the possibility of generating fuel parallel to its consumption. Therefore, technologists interpreted the decision to shutdown the ‘Superphénix’ in 1997 as a supposedly untimely one, due to an unforeseen majority change. However, our research shows that the disengagement from the 'breeder' program was a long process.
Since the 1950s, technologists have assembled resources aimed at creating a technological development pathway. However, after costs became "uncomfortable knowledge" (Rayner, 2012), their directors progressively disengaged from further technology developments by postponing them, while preserving the construction of Superphénix. They created new attachments in order to perform some detachments. They promoted a counter-project addressing the same fuel consumption issues as the ‘breeder’ programme and constituted the 'breeder' program as a “facultative passage point”, while reinforcing the legitimacy of its very objective. Then the definition and purpose of the existing Superphénix were shifted through an industrial de-qualification and its re-qualification as an epistemic object (Knorr-Cetina, 1996), with open evaluations considering its purpose. The paper theorises the stages of attachment and detachment in the disengagement of an innovation policy and the unmaking of a technology. It discusses claims of untimeliness and earliness, be it of development or disengagement.

A sea of possibilities — forgotten cables, natural protection and corporate accountability in the Mediterranean Sea

Loup Cellard, ADM+S, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne; with Clément Marquet

This talk narrates the slow disappearance of four submarine telecommunication cables around the city of Marseille (south of France) and untangles the different modes of existence of these infrastructural ruins: from the deactivated network weaved of marine plants, to the ownerless objects waiting to be removed from the sea, till the maritime dumping ground soon to be cleaned once cables will be sent in a recycling program.

The talk will narrate the activity of a French regional marine park — namely The Marine Park of the Blue Coast — which fought for several years with the main national telecommunications operator Orange to obtain in 2019 the removal of the four submarine cables. They were installed between 1978 and 1993 but then deactivated in 2004. The presentation will be based on the analysis of legal documents that were used to compel Orange to remove the cables as well as interviews with members of the regional park, local authorities, and other diverse actors who participated in the removal. 

In a context where the French Environmental Code expects cable owners to remove them and return the seabed the way they initially found it, it remains unclear who makes them accountable for these actions and what does it mean to bring back an aquatic space as found when the cables have been merging with marine biodiversity for decades.

Infrastructural untimeliness of academic work settings and the new normal of post-pandemic working hours

Julie Mewes, Museum für Naturkunde - Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity; with Frauke Rohden

Academic work unfolds in time. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, academics have experienced extensive re-adjustments to suit new social, material, and technological needs of work. The paper focuses on questions of how, when, and through which means working time is sociotechnically arranged on- and off-campus and discusses the ‘new normal’ of remote work (Vyas, 2022) as an ending of academia as on-site workplace.

Increasing academics’ workloads and their predominantly negative impact on the experience of time within novel funding regimes (Ylijoki & Mäntylä, 2003), and experiences of altered speed and resulting time pressure are well-studied (Vostal, 2015, 2021). However, ‘flexible’ (or untamed) working hours and specific transtemporal and translocal academic time-spaces (Sheail, 2018) have increased further following pandemic measures, especially affecting insecurely employed academics (Smithers et al., 2022). Nevertheless, infrastructures for tracing working hours typically remain based on assumptions of uninterrupted regular on-site working hours, as well as clear separation of personal and work devices.

Empirical focus is put on the seemingly boring, mundane timing devices acting as micro-coordinators of daily academic work life, i.e. digital and non-digital tools and infrastructures which – with or without intention and/or recognition – measure, track, synchronise, or account for working hours and daily time routines in the broadest sense (Mewes, 2023). 

This paper presents an exploratory study of the authors’ own work timing practices and seemingly untamed and untimely academic time-spaces, to explore the relationship between academic “chronopolitics” and “chronodesigns” (Felt, 2017; Dieter & Gauthier, 2019) by combining digital methods and on-site ethnographic observation (Jensen, 2022). 

Framing retirement in agile public sector digitalisation

Jessamy Perriam, IT University of Copenhagen

The public sector has a decades-long history of digitalisation, for instance the first wave of public sector technology use involved the conversion of citizen data from paper into a machine readable data format to allow government departments to process data en masse (Hicks 2018). This form of public sector digitalisation did not directly involve the citizen as they were still interacting with their data by filling out paper forms. 

Digitalisation as we currently use the term refers to the use of technology for the citizen to self-serve or self-manage their own data and government transactions. Much of this digitalisation occurs under an iterative, agile style project management, which favours swift implementation rather than a considered, drawn out process. While the front end of these digitalised services appear contemporary, many are built on an installed base of pre-agile technology, which sometimes assert their refusal to allow government transactions to run as efficiently as expected.

In this paper, I draw upon STS related literature from infrastructure studies and e-government to consider how we can integrate, maintain or retire pre-agile legacy infrastructure in contemporary digitalisation practices.

I will draw upon examples of digital transformation from the UK and Danish public sector to highlight how a focus older technologies in digitalisation is as (if not more) important than a focus on innovation.

Unmaking psychiatry? Transforming diagnosis and negotiating sociotechnical in/stability in psychiatric praxis

Martyn Pickersgill, University of Edinburgh

The American Psychiatric Association ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM) exemplifies so-called categorical diagnosis: through it, people can be characterised as ‘having’ a psychiatric disorder. It acts as epistemic and ontological infrastructure within psychiatry internationally - shaping understandings of what mental ill-health is, how it should be acted upon, and how it can be studied. Psychiatry in many countries, then, would look very different without the DSM. Indeed, powerful institutions and actors have, over the last decade, sought to move away from the use of the DSM in research, and potentially clinical practice – in effect, unmaking psychiatry as currently practised in the US especially, as well as in a variety of other contexts. Through interviews with opinion leaders in, and clinical practitioners of, psychiatry, this paper addresses such unmaking via attention to criticisms of categorical diagnosis. Interviewees widely lament the DSM and the categories within it – buttressing efforts to reimagine psychiatry and unmake it in terms of its formal emphasis on categorical diagnosis. However, psychiatrists also employ a range of the epistemic and pragmatic defences of the DSM and similar texts – justifying the ongoing use of categorical diagnosis in research and clinical practice. These justifications consequently contribute to the institutional (re)stabilisation of psychiatry in the face of attempts to mutate the sociotechnical assemblage constitutive of the discipline. Efforts to unmake psychiatry in its current form are in some circumstances paradoxically serving to re-entrench professional power and authority, alongside practitioner discord and discontent.

The Pace of Ending(s): Nakagin as a Manifestation of Meanings

Daniel Aditya Tjhin, Uppsala University

Within the temporal entanglements of negotiated declines and endings of technological infrastructures, I propose that one aspect that can be further explored in negotiating the (un-)timeliness of endings is the pace in which such endings are enacted. The paces of dismantling, disarticulating and depreciating aging sociotechnical systems become relevant due to the continuously changing technopolitical configurations of sociotechnical systems within the processes of their declining and unmaking. The changes in knowledge, practices and imaginaries – particularly if the pace of ending is slow – transform the relationships between technological infrastructures with their varieties of attachments and commitments. In order to reinforce my proposition about the changing technopolitical entanglements of sociotechnical system, supposedly associated with the pace of ending, I wish to utilise the now demolished Nakagin Capsule Tower from Tokyo, Japan, as an illustrative example. The building has held multiple meanings in its lifetime – an icon for an architectural movement, manifestation of a Zeitgeist, a historical heritage and perhaps most importantly, a dream of what could have been. Despite lasting for a little over 50 years, I will argue that the capsule tower had been in a state of decline ever since its completion as its temporal and technopolitical entanglements were continuously being remade. From this illustrative example, I will reiterate my proposal that within the temporal entanglements of sociotechnical systems, paying attention to the pace of ending may reveal the ongoing negotiations of sociotechnical relations that continuously reframe the (un-)timeliness of endings.