Infrastructure: Meanings and Politics

Undergraduate / Graduate

Ubiquitous in our daily lives and global society, infrastructure serves as a vital lens for examining the increasingly entangled relationships between humans, built environments, and the more-than-human world. Drawing on scholarship from Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Urban Studies, this course mobilizes infrastructure as a powerful analytical framework for understanding the state, society, and planetary life. While infrastructure is often defined as underlying material structures, we will also investigate infrastructure as a deeply affective, symbolic, and sensorial phenomenon. Students will be introduced to ongoing scholarly debates and will develop their own critical insights to produce a comprehensive literature review on a chosen topic. This course is designed for graduate students, with limited enrollment available for interested junior or senior undergraduates.