Course description
Infrastructure is back. From the U.S. presidential election to China's growing overseas investments, promises of infrastructure development are at the forefront of political debates across the globe. In academia, too, recent years have seen a proliferation of social sciences and humanities studies of infrastructure. Here, infrastructure is often a lens to address broader issues: social relations, forms of political or discursive power, categories and standardizations, ontological transformations, the social imaginaries of material development projects, relations between built and non-built environments, and anthropogenic climate change and mass extinction.

Engaging with this rapidly growing literature, this course approaches infrastructures as material and symbolic processual entities, rather than fixed or static things on the ground, that both take shape within and simultaneously shape broader political, social, cultural, and environmental dynamics. In symbolic form, infrastructures routinely reflect ideals of progress, however unevenly distributed. In material form, infrastructures produce and mobilize new relationships that shape spaces of inclusion and exclusion. Together, the symbolic and material co-production of infrastructures generate distinct political economies of governance that enable liberation but also perpetuate ongoing inequalities, set new terms of mobility and containment, trigger the circulation of complex discourses of anticipation, and foster widespread hope and anxieties among a variety of publics.

This course considers the rubric of infrastructure in light of more recent critical studies in anthropology, human geography, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). The aim is to advance our capacity to interpret existing materialities and structures, including their failures and unintended consequences, and apply this to identifying how and where "infrastructure thinking" can be useful to unpack specific issues (such as students' research questions and topical points of interest). Some questions that frame our inquiry include:

- How are infrastructure projects leveraged for both state-making and geopolitical purposes?
- How are colonial-imperial models of development reproduced as infrastructural diplomacy today?
- What 'lies beneath' and 'runs above' material infrastructures themselves, and why?
- How can 'infrastructure thinking" help up understanding the current climate moment?
- In the Anthropocene, can we draw a line between human infrastructure and nonhuman environments?

Description of the virtual component
I envision two virtual components for this course taking place before and during the course, respectively.

- Prior to the beginning of the course students will be asked to submit two items: a picture of a particular "infrastructure space" and a short (max 300 words) answer to the question: what is, for you, an infrastructure? We will meet online (on Zoom) before the course, and I will ask each student to tell us something about the picture they sent, such as: why did you choose this particular infrastructure space? What does it tell us about infrastructure in general? What questions do you have about this particular space? This will be a way for the students to get to know each other, and to learn about each other's interests. I will then go through some of the answers to the question "what is an infrastructure?" to tease out some of the themes and topics that we will address in class.

- During the course I will share three short ethnographic film centred around the theme of "infrastructure" (see below). Students will watch them individually, and will answer a set of questions on the Moodle. We will then discuss them in class, alongside some key texts.

Learning Outcomes
After the course, students are expected to:
• Read and interpret case studies of infrastructure development with a critical lens of analysis
• Gain a foundation in the key social sciences literature of infrastructure studies
• Trace trajectories of infrastructural power from colonial periods to 21st century technologies
• Identify how political power is leveraged via investment and development of built environments
• Identify and discuss different trends (new materialism, ontological turn, multispecies ethnography, etc.) that contribute to various approaches to infrastructure in the social sciences today
• Develop tools and techniques of critical communication through reading, writing, and discussion

Teaching and evaluation methods
Teaching will consist of brief lectures and class discussions, based on the readings assigned for the given session. Students will be asked to share an "infrastructure story" (see below) once during the course. Visual material (films, pictures, multi-media resources) will be used and discussed during class.

Evaluation of the student's performance will be based on the following:

1. Participation. Class participation encompasses a variety of things: how much you contribute, respectfulness, and preparedness. I expect everyone to attend class regularly after having read and prepared the assignment, and to participate in the discussion.

2. Infrastructure story. On one occasion in the course of the semester each student will be responsible for preparation and presentation of a particular story centred around an infrastructure. This can be something that students have personal knowledge of, a news item, or an historical event. Possible examples are protests surrounding a particular infrastructure project (a dam, a road, an apartment complex, etc.), the breakdown of particular infrastructures (server farms, water pipes, etc.), or community-led movement to build and maintain particular infrastructure, among others. Presentations must not be longer than 5 minutes, and should ideally be accompanied by a brief PPT. Students will let us know where they got the story, what kind of source it is, how reliable it is, and what aspects of the story tell us something new about our understanding of infrastructure and its broader ramifications. I will evaluate the ability to summarize the issue in accessible language, to provide some additional information and background, and to critically assess its relevance for the overall aims of the course.

3. Moodle assignment. During the course students will be asked to watch three films, and answer a set of three questions about them on the Moodle. These will be short (2-300 words) answers.

4. Final Exam. The exam consists of three questions, that will be provided prior to the end of the course. Each answer should be between 2000-3000 words. For each answer students are required to reference and discuss at least two of the readings (required or recommended) that we have discussed during the semester. Students are more than welcome to use additional material (only making sure to reference it correctly and always using direct quote if you are using someone else's words). I will assess and evaluate the answers according to the following four criteria:
A. Coherence: answers directly addresses the particular question that is asked, showing an understanding of the question posed and the ability to think independently in answering it.
B. Analysis and argumentation: I will evaluate the ability to find suitable sources and critically engage with them. In the answer students should make a logical argument based on the most appropriate source(s).
C. Structure and Writing: The answer needs to be structured in a coherent manner and progress without any major gap or flow. I will evaluate clarity, precision, economy of writing and the accurate use of academic language and writing conventions.
D. Presentation and Referencing: Presentation is important. Answers need to have a consistent style and pagination. It is very important that students correctly attribute sources through citations and that students list sources in a bibliography at the end. Students can choose any reference style (I suggest Harvard or Chicago format) – just be consistent once one particular format has been selected.

Grades will be calculated as follow:
20 % Participation
15 % Infrastructure story
15 % Moodle Assignment
50 % Final essay

Required preliminary knowledge
No preliminary knowledge is required.

Bibliography
Amin, A. 2014. "Lively infrastructure." Theory, Culture, & Society 31(7/8): 137-161.
Anand, N. 2011. "Pressure: The Politechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai." Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 542-564.
Barry, A. 2013. Material Politics: Disputes along the pipeline. Oxford: Wiley.
Carse, A. 2012. "Nature as infrastructure: Making and managing the Panama Canal watershed." Social Studies of Science 42(4): 539-563.
Carse, A. 2017. "Keyword: infrastructure." In: Harvey, P., C. Bruun Jensen & A. Morita (eds.), Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion. London & New York: Routledge, 27-40.
Collier, S., Mizes, J.C., and A. von Schitzler. 2016. "Public infrastructures / infrastructural publics." Limn (7): http://limn.it/issue/07/.
Cowen, D. 2020. "Following the infrastructures of empire: notes on cities, settler colonialism, and method." Urban Geography 41(4): 469-486.
Harvey, P.; Knox, H. 2012. "The Enchantments of Infrastructure." Mobilities 7(4): 521-536.
Ishii, M. 2017. "Caring for Divine Infrastructures: Nature and Spirits in a Special Economic Zone in India." Ethnos 82(4): 690-710.
Larkin, B. 2013. "The politics and poetics of infrastructure." Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327-343.
Masquelier, A. 2008. "Road Mythographies: Space, Mobility, and the Historical Imagination in Postcolonial Niger." American Ethnologist 29(4): 829-856.
Morita, A. 2017. "Multispecies Infrastructure: Infrastructural Inversion and Involutionary Entanglements in the Chao Phraya Delta, Thailand." Ethnos 82(4): 738-757.
Rest, M. 2018. "Dreaming of Pipes: Kathmandu's long-delayed Melamchi Water Supply Project."Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 37(7): 1198-1216.
Schwenkel, C. 2015 "Spectacular Infrastructure and its Breakdown in Socialist Vietnam." American Ethnologist 42(3): 520-534.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. "The Ethnography of Infrastructure." American Behavioral Scientist 43: 377-391.
Truelove, Y. 2020. "Who is the state? Infrastructural power and everyday water politics in Delhi.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654419897922.
Tsing, A.; Deger, J.; Saxena, A.K.; and F. Zhou. 2021. Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene.
Stanford University Press (available at www.feralatlas.org).

Films
Chaiqian / Demolition (J.P. Sniadecki, 2008)
Froth (Ilya Povolotskiy, 2019)
Powerless (Fahad Mustafa, 2014)