The editors' two introductory essays to this collection draw upon a broader historical discourse about temporalities-time experienced as "mingled pasts, presents, and futures"-to tie together the heretofore tangentially connected studies of maintenance, repair, reuse, and disposal (see M. Champion, "The History of Temporalities," 2019). Given that human cultures generate layers of technology in use, they argue, any particular technological system displays varying depths of overlapping chronologies and contexts of creation, use, repair, dismantlement, reuse, disposal, and decay. Thus, at any point in time, any technological system is polychronic, or exhibits a mixture of ages in use that reflect dynamic amalgams of overlapping socio-technical parts in varying states of persistence. Interrogating the persistence of technology in this layered, polychronic sense is the editors' core heuristic contribution to the field.
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