Undergraduate

Module Content

This course considers the role that infrastructures of different kinds – from roads to energy systems, borders to algorithms – play in the shaping of social life around the world. The course brings together existing anthropological studies of infrastructures with student-led discussion about emerging contemporary digital infrastructures (e.g. smart cities, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, data-driven modelling). Together we will work to understand and reflect on these old and new infrastructures and consider how to best study and understand their effects on social and cultural relations.

During the course, students will be introduced to historical and contemporary ethnographic studies of infrastructures and will learn about how material infrastructure have shaped social and political relations throughout the 20th century. In addition, students will be taught a range of theoretical approaches to understanding infrastructures, including: actor-network theory, the ethnography of infrastructure, affect theory, material politics, and ontological approaches to understanding technical systems. Through seminar based presentations, blog posts, collective reading exercises, and topic-based visits this learning will be applied to thinking about and understanding digital systems and social life.

Delivery Method

One 2 hour lecture and one 1 hour tutorial per week.

Postgraduate

Module Content

This course considers the role that infrastructures of different kinds – from roads to energy systems, borders to algorithms – play in the shaping of social life around the world. The course brings together existing anthropological studies of infrastructures with student-led discussion about emerging contemporary digital infrastructures (e.g. smart cities, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, data-driven modelling). Together we will work to understand and reflect on these old and new infrastructures and consider how to best study and understand their effects on social and cultural relations.

During the course, students will be introduced to historical and contemporary ethnographic studies of infrastructures and will learn about how material infrastructure have shaped social and political relations throughout the 20th century. In addition, students will be taught a range of theoretical approaches to understanding infrastructures, including: actor-network theory, the ethnography of infrastructure, affect theory, material politics, and ontological approaches to understanding technical systems. Through seminar based presentations, blog posts, collective reading exercises, and topic-based visits this learning will be applied to thinking about and understanding digital systems and social life.

Delivery Method

One 2 hour seminar per week.