Postdoctoral Researcher, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Uppsala, Sweden
About Syed Shoaib
Shoaib is a postdoctoral researcher at the Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies (SIAS), Kathmandu. His academic interests lie at the confluence of emerging multi-disciplinary conversation on the aesthetics of nature in art, architecture, science, policy, and technology worlds.
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Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Syed Shoaib's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
Maintenance of Forest Restoration: The Fragility of Promised Futures
As a growing area of inquiry in STS, maintenance studies brings two critical insights to the post-Actor Network Theory (ANT) landscape. First, relations are not a state of nature, but once established, take a great amount of ongoing, behind-the-scenes effort to maintain and mend (Star, 1991; Denis and Pontille, 2019). Second, a greater locus of scientific research and innovation is invested in the assemblies of maintenance and repair than in the creation of novel ones (Edgerton, 2011). Stability is ever produced through a constant recognition and remediation of the material fragility of things (Denis & Pontille, 2023). In their seminal article in Theory, Culture & Society, Graham and Thrift (2007) dug forth the ever-expanding arena of maintenance and repair that constitute infrastructures and objects which otherwise remain invisible to the public eye, doing their job. Moments of breakdown cast socially unacceptable ruptures in the fabric of life, inviting all forms (read more...)