[Commlist] Communication Maintenance in Longue Durée. A paper-based workshop

Communication Maintenance in Longue Durée. A paper-based workshop

In the last decades, more and more scholars have claimed for an 
inclusion of maintenance among the key topics and key questions of 
technology (Edgerton 2007, Jackson 2014, Russell and Vinsel 2018, Henke 
and Sims 2020,). Communication and media studies have just partially 
included in their methodological and analytical tools reflections on 
maintenance (see Balbi and Leggero 2020; Weber and Krebs 2021) and this 
paper-based workshop aims to advance in this aspect adding another 
fundamental yet underestimated layer in communication and maintenance 
research: the longue durée.

Maintenance of communication infrastructures, for example, is a 
long-term process lasting for decades or even centuries. On the one 
hand, roads, networks and cables are constantly maintained to keep them 
functioning but, on the other, to understand their strategic relevance 
is important to adopt a longue durée perspective (Braudel 1958), since 
those channels of communication have often political, economic, and 
socio-cultural relevance. Sometimes, maintenance has a strong effect not 
only in preserving communication infrastructures, but also in modifying 
or even dismantling them. In long terms, communications can be radically 
changed because of maintenance and transformed into something totally 
different from what was originally to be maintained.

Furthermore, despite or even because of maintenance and its related 
costs, communication infrastructures are abandoned in favor of other and 
apparently most “advanced” technologies of communication, whose 
maintenance is easier for example. This is typical when new technologies 
of communication emerge or when new cultures of maintenance appear.

Finally, communication maintenance in longue durée can also be 
considered in political and cultural terms. Sometimes, the technological 
dimension of the communication infrastructure to be maintained is 
secondary and political ideologies are more relevant: national or 
regional demands, (fake or real) ethnical ancestries, centers and 
peripheries, mountains and flatlands, cultural claims are all relevant 
in deciding to maintain an old and misused road, an undersea cable, a 
trait of railway, etc.

This workshop will host methodological and empirical approaches and we 
aim for contributions ranging from history to anthropology, from 
geography to political studies, from economics to obviously 
communication and transportation studies. The papers will have to deal 
with the topic of maintenance in communication in long-term at large, 
have to discuss about problems and challenges, opportunities and 
successes as well as failures, cultural changes and continuities over 
time in thinking the maintenance of communication. Papers should be 
focused not only on one specific point in time but take into account 
decades and centuries in order to grasp the hidden changes and undersea 
continuities which are not evident.

This two-day workshop will be held in person, if possible.

Important dates and deadlines
- In order to proceed with the selection we ask for a 300-word abstract 
to be sent to (gabriele.balbi /at/ usi.ch) and (roberto.leggero /at/ usi.ch) by 20 
August 2021.
- The selected participants will be notified by 20 September 2021 and 
they will have to provide a draft paper of max 5’000 words by 31 January 
2022.
- This paper will be discussed collectively during the workshop on 24-25 
February 2022, held in Mendrisio (Switzerland).

Organizing Committee
- Gabriele Balbi, USI Università della Svizzera italiana (Switzerland)
- Stefan Krebs, University of Luxembourg (Luxemburg)
- Roberto Leggero, USI Università della Svizzera italiana (Switzerland)
- Massimo Rospocher, Italian-German Historical Institute, Trent (Italy)
- Andrew Russell, SUNY Polytechnic Institute (US)
- Hitomi Sato, Konan University (Japan)
- Heike Weber, Technische Universität Berlin (Germany)

Local Organizers
- Laboratorio di Storia delle Alpi, USI Università della Svizzera 
italiana (Switzerland)
- Institute of Media and Journalism, USI Università della Svizzera 
italiana (Switzerland)

For more info, please see 
http://www.labisalp.arc.usi.ch/it/news/detail/31277

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