Integrating Project Seminar (395-0-2)

Topic

The Politics of Everyday Infrastructures

Instructors

Chloe Emilie Bernadaux

Meeting Info

Annenberg Hall G28: Tues, Thurs 9:30AM - 10:50AM

Overview of class

The Politics of Everyday Infrastructures

Infrastructure is everywhere and, most of the time, invisible, until the lights go out, the network drops, the water stops, or a road closes. This seminar takes that invisibility as its starting point. Moving beyond considering infrastructure as a neutral background, we ask how the systems that move electricity, water, people, and information are animated by political life. These systems allocate resources, organize populations, enforce hierarchies, and ground claims to authority.

To study infrastructure is to study power in one of its most ordinary and consequential forms. We begin by building up what infrastructure is and does and then work through the distinct registers of power it carries (social control, repression, colonial rule, racial exclusion, wartime violence, and international coercion) before exploring how people contest it. The course is explicitly comparative, drawing cases from the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the United States.

As a capstone research seminar, this course is also designed to help you learn how to conduct research. We will read scholarship that draws on qualitative and quantitative approaches, as well as a range of data-collection strategies, and we will discuss how different methods help us answer different kinds of questions. Most importantly, you will develop an original research project of your own, moving from an initial puzzle to a completed research design.

Class Attributes

Attendance at 1st class mandatory