Infrastructure Histories

Undergraduate / Graduate

Dams, sewers, container ships, water pipes, power lines, air conditioning, and garbage dumps: the critical infrastructures that enable modern life are so often invisible, except when they fail. This course explores the historical role of infrastructure as a set of planet-spanning systems of resource extraction and crucial conduits of social and political power. Looking at cases from apartheid South Africa and the Suez Canal to Mumbai and Chicago itself, we will consider the relationship of infrastructure with capitalism, settler colonialism, and postcolonial development. We will see how forms of citizenship and exclusion have been shaped and negotiated via wires, leaky pipes, and improvised repairs, and we will consider perhaps the biggest question of all: In this age of ecological crisis, do energy-guzzling infrastructural systems have a strange form of more-than-human agency all of their own?