scispace - formally typeset
Open AccessJournal Article

Vulnerability Tests. Matters of “Care for Matter” in E-waste Practices

Blanca Callén, +1 more
- 29 Jan 2016 - 
- Vol. 6, Iss: 2, pp 17-40
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
This paper explores different practices to “care for matter”, mobilized in dealing with obsolete computers, categorized as electronic waste, and will analyse the epistemic repertoires to acknowledge and intervene in such computers vulnerabilities.
Abstract
In this paper we will think ethnographically about how material vulnerability is dealt with and conceived of in the practice of informal menders. We explore different practices to “care for matter”, mobilized in dealing with obsolete computers, categorized as electronic waste, and will analyse the epistemic repertoires to acknowledge and intervene in such computers vulnerabilities. In dialogue with STS and Repair and Maintenance Studies literature, we will move from vulnerability as an ontological quality of the world to the enacted properties and epistemic repertoires emerging from concrete “tests”, through which we might learn how vulnerability matters. In particular, we pay attention to three specific vulnerability tests performed by these informal menders, underpinning particular distributions of labour as well as concrete enactments of vulnerability, and how to make it matter. Namely, sensing matter: manipulative practices of electronic waste whereby vulnerability is enacted as a property of materials; setting up informal experiments: informal practices of trial and error whereby vulnerability appears as a result of dis/functioning technical systems; and intervening in obsolescence: whereby sociomaterial orders regulate how material vulnerabilities are redistributed and put to the test. Keywords: maintenance & repair; matters of care; vulnerability; test; electronic waste.

read more

Content maybe subject to copyright    Report

Citations
More filters

Cognition In The Wild

TL;DR: The cognition in the wild is universally compatible with any devices to read and is available in the digital library an online access to it is set as public so you can download it instantly.
References
More filters
Book

Cognition in the wild

TL;DR: Welcome aboard navigation as computation the implementation of contemporary pilotage the organization of team performances communication navigation as a context for learning learning in context organizational learning cultural cognition.
Book

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Judith Butler
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that it is acceptable, even necessary, to grieve some lives, while others are not valued or are even incomprehensible as lives at all, and argue against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate.
Book

The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice

Annemarie Mol
TL;DR: The Body Multiple draws on medical anthropology, sociology, feminist theory, philosophy, and science and technology studies to reframe such issues as the disease-illness distinction, subject-object relations, boundaries, difference, situatedness, and ontology.
Book

Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an overview of the history of the field of molecular biology, including the origins of the two-tier structure of a two-tiered laboratory.
Book

Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care

TL;DR: In Moral Boundaries as mentioned in this paper, Tronto provides one of the most original responses to the controversial questions surrounding women and caring and demonstrates that feminist thinkers have failed to realise the political context which has shaped their debates about care.
Related Papers (5)