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An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Infrastructures—communication, food, transportation, energy, and information—are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them. Repair can encompass not only the kind of work we most commonly associate with the term but also any set of practices aimed at restoring a sense of normalcy or credibility to the places and institutions we inhabit in everyday life. From cases as diverse as the repair of building systems on a university campus, a conflict over retrofitting a bridge while protecting murals painted on it, and the global challenge posed by climate change, Henke and Sims assemble a range of examples to illustrate key conceptual points about the role of repair. They show that repair is an essential if often overlooked aspect of understanding the broader impact and politics of infrastructures. Understanding repair helps us better understand infrastructures and the scope of their influence on our lives. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

The river goes through New Orleans like an elevated highway. Jackson Square, in the French Quarter, is on high ground with respect to the rest of New Orleans, but even from the benches of Jackson Square one looks up across the levee at the hulls of the passing ships. Their keels are higher than the Astro Turf in the Superdome, and if somehow the ships could turn and move at river level into the city and into the stadium they would hover above the playing field like blimps.

During the Cold War, the credibility of US nuclear weapons scientists was backed up by an integrated system for designing, testing, and manufacturing nuclear weapons. As the Cold War drew to a close in the 1990s, weapons scientists warned that their knowledge was so deeply embedded in the design and testing of nuclear weapons that it might not survive if this system were disrupted. Sociologists Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi used this as evidence for the role of tacit knowledge in weapons design, suggesting that a halt to weapons design and testing could bring on a crisis of credibility, and possibly the 'uninvention' of nuclear weapons. In this paper, we examine how the weapons community has avoided such a crisis of credibility. Our analysis turns on the concept of sociotechnical repair -the processes communities and institutions engage in to sustain their existence, identity, and boundaries, particularly when faced with disruptive change. We examine two post-Cold War repair efforts that demonstrate how actors carefully balance discursive, institutional, and material change in the repair of complex sociotechnical systems. The Stockpile Stewardship Program positions weapons expertise as an abstract body of knowledge, and seeks to repair the credibility of weapons scientists by embedding their knowledge in a new sociotechnical context of computer simulation and experimental science. The Reliable Replacement Warhead concept emphasizes the close relationship between weapons knowledge and the design features of stockpile warheads, and seeks to repair credibility by introducing weapons designs optimized for long-term stockpile storage. These repair efforts show that weapons scientists' views of their own knowledge continued to evolve after the end of the Cold War. In particular, weapons scientists maintained credibility with key constituencies by treating tacit knowledge as a flexible resource that can be successfully integrated into new sociotechnical arrangements.Keywords credibility, nuclear weapons, organizations, repair, sociotechnical systems Sims and Henke 325What does it mean to say that a nation has a credible nuclear capability? One seemingly obvious answer is testing: between 1944 and 1992 the US alone detonated more than 1000 nuclear weapons (US Department of Energy, 2000), and images of the mushroom cloud, combined with the horrific scenes caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were the signature scientific and technological demonstrations of the 20th century (Gusterson, 1996: 131-164; Masco, 2006: 44-98). Similarly, states such as India, Pakistan, and North Korea have sought to establish themselves as credible nuclear powers on the world stage by conducting nuclear tests. In recent years, however, as the major nuclear powers have observed a moratorium on nuclear testing, they have had to grapple with the question of how to maintain technical credibility and aging weapons stockpiles while also projecting confidence in their weapons without the dramatic demonstration that testing...

This paper explores the complex interaction between a group of University of California `farm advisors' and the farm community that they are meant to advise. In contrast with previous literature in science and technology studies (S&TS) on the distinctions between `laboratory science' and `field science', I show how advisors' work is a blend of these modes. More specifically, I focus on the advisors' use of `field trials' - field-based experiments conducted on growers' land - to convince their agricultural clientele to farm in a new way. Field trials retain some characteristics of lab science, such as control groups and special, experimental methods, but they are also solidly in the field, as they are often conducted on a grower's property, and the data from the experiment are a grower's crop. Drawing from my fieldwork with farm advisors and growers, I use the case of agricultural field trials to illustrate the role of `place' in applied science, highlight issues of `control' between scientists and their `public' in the field, and point to the challenges of producing consent through field trials.