248 - Maintenance & Repair (feat. Jérôme Denis & David Pontille)

Cymene and Dominic share pirate tales from the Sundance Film Festival and reimagine Heated Rivalry with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk as the lead lovers. Then (15:34) we welcome Jérôme Denis and David Pontille to the podcast to discuss not one but two new books, The Care of Things: Ethics and Politics of Maintenance (Wiley, 2025) and Fragilities: Essays on the Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics of Maintenance and Repair (MIT Press, 2025). We begin with how they became interested in the concept of fragility through their fieldwork with people responsible for maintaining and caring for infrastructure. From there, we turn toward the distinction between repair and maintenance and how their fieldwork led them to pay attention to attention as an aspect of the phenomenology of care work. We talk about how to think about the flux and power of matter and close by discussing maintenance as a subversive practice in the era of planned obsolescence and their interest in the right to repair movement.