A Workshop on Maintenance, Care and Repair

Maastricht University - 10 June 2025

Organizers: Lauren Wagner, Mark Thomas Young, Jérôme Denis, Claartje Rasterhoff, Christian Ernsten, Léna Silberzahn, Joma Ronden

Maintenance studies is an emerging field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), which connects to many issues from the construction of buildings, to the maintenance of city streets, to the struggle for the ‘right to repair’, to the problem of dying and neglected software. Making Things Last - a workshop on maintenance, care and repair aims to bring together scholars from STS with other disciplines where understanding the work that goes into maintaining and reusing materials, objects, and technologies is emerging with more force, including cultural studies, architecture, and urban studies. We are prompted to organize this workshop now because we are fundamentally curious to learn about each other’s insights in diverse domains that intersect in the problem, as defined by Jérôme Denis and David Pointille (2023), of ‘making things last’. 

Alongside the cluster of participants and organizers based at UM, we will invite 15 experts based in Europe as participants. These include the co-organizers Jérôme Denis (Univ Paris - École des Mines) and Mark Thomas Young (Univ Oslo), along with artists working with repair and regeneration and scholars from STS, urban geography, cultural studies, and other areas where new work on maintenance, care and repair is emerging. 

The activities of the workshop will focus on creating opportunities for participants to learn about and from each other’s work, while also collaborating to articulate key research directions for this field. Rather than presentations of individual work one by one, we plan for alternative and active formats of exchange over the course of a day-long meeting. We intend to take advantage of the local resources of Maastricht, including ‘living labs’ in the city where projects related to conservation and maintenance are ongoing, as well as the facilities of the Jan van Eyck Future Materials lab and the MERIAN creative space, all of which as sites for inspiration and discussion.

The outcomes of Making Things Last are intended to be realized through networks and projects that can grow from it. Most concretely, we aspire to found a European network of scholars in this area, which can be ignited in future development of more formal research or doctoral funding networks. We also hope to collaborate in developing research questions and agendas in this domain, which will likely be collaborative activities that extend beyond this meeting.