Infrastructures of Power

Graduate / Professional

This seminar examines infrastructure as a site of power, exploring how built systems, from irrigation networks and railroads to telegraph cables and oil extraction, produced and sustained colonial and postcolonial conditions. We ask how infrastructure projects created new forms of territorial control, legal authority, and environmental transformation across multiple historical contexts, how these systems were experienced by different populations, and how they continue to shape contemporary possibilities. We trace infrastructure across global contexts, attending to the technical, legal, and social dimensions of projects that remade landscapes and governance structures. The course moves from foundational theoretical approaches through historical case studies, concluding with analyses of how these systems persist, fail, or get repurposed in the present. Students develop a final research project analyzing an infrastructure system of their choice in specific locations. Th 9:25am-11:20am