[Themaintainers] readings for infrastructure course

Wed Nov 22 04:49:33 EST 2017

So, I’ll throw in some cents in this thread too, recommendations from after having held a course on “sustainable transformations of infrastructures” last year:

John May’s provocative “Infrastructuralism: The Pathology of Negative Externalities” (it’s a great title), which argues that infrastructure’s solution to problems is always done by transferring them elsewhere (out of sight and/or out of mind). http://quaderns.coac.net/en/2011/09/262-may/

I also find Paul Edwards text “How fast can we transition to a low-carbon energy system” to be a good introduction, starting off as it does from the claim that “decarbonization is an infrastructure problem, the largest one humanity has ever faced”. http://bit.ly/1I6ouAQ

On the solutions side of things, I’ve also used shorter excerpts from Hillary Brown’s “Next Generation Infrastructures” in courses, which applies a design-oriented perspective on infrastructural transformations. https://islandpress.org/book/next-generation-infrastructure

Last, you could also throw in some of the “resource use”-aspect, which tends to be neglected in comparison to the climate change/energy use-oriented discussions when it comes to infrastructures. Here, Timothy LeCains “Mass Destruction” connects the early construction of electric grids in the US to the rise of large-scale, open pit copper mining: http://bit.ly/2zXAVjj, and there is also my own urban mining-stuff (sorry for the self-promotion) on “urks”, i.e. all of those bits and pieces of infrastructures that remain in the ground after having been taken out of use: http://bit.ly/2xlOiVa

//Björn Wallsten

• Pargman, D. and Wallsten, B. (2017) “Resource Scarcity and Socially Just Internet Access Over Time and Space” <http://bit.ly/2rPh67u> Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Computing Within Limits<http://acmlimits.org/2017/papers/limits17-pargman.pdf> 29-36.
• Krook, J. and Wallsten, B. (2017) “Syntesrapport från projektet Städer som gruvor – Tio huvudpunkter”. [in Swedish<http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1071310/FULLTEXT01.pdf>]
________________________________
Björn WALLSTEN, Post doc researcher.
Department of Thematic Studies – Technology and Social Change
Linköping University
SE-581 83 Linköping
Phone: +46 (0) 1328 5625
Homepage: https://www.tema.liu.se/tema-t/medarbetare/wallsten-bjorn?l=en
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From: themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu <themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu> on behalf of Camille E. Acey <connect at camilleacey.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 9:19:24 PM
To: Andrew Russell
Cc: themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu
Subject: Re: [Themaintainers] readings for infrastructure course

I'd love someone to throw this up on a website somewhere. the Resources section of the Maintainers site looks a little bare ;) http://themaintainers.org/resources/

On 2017-11-21 06:59, Andrew Russell wrote:

Amazing thread!  Thank you all so much for the suggestions and the inspiration.  Don't stop now!

I remarked to a friend yesterday that there's nothing like the feeling of writing a new syllabus: a strange combination of exhilaration (so many good ideas I want to convey to the students!) and despair (how am I ever going to pull this off?).

And now I know that if it all falls apart I can borrow Jérôme's brilliant idea to put on maintenance and repair lenses and watch South Park!

Andy

On Nov 20, 2017, at 3:54 PM, Jérôme Denis <jerome.denis at mines-paristech.fr<mailto:jerome.denis at mines-paristech.fr>> wrote:
Great thread indeed!

On the articles side, I would also highly recommend these four papers, each of them providing meticulous depictions of fascinating cases, great for students :

Barnes, J. E. (2017). States of maintenance: Power, politics, and Egypts irrigation infrastructure. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(1), 146-164.
Edensor, T. (2011). Entangled agencies, material networks and repair in a building assemblage: The mutable stone of St Ann's church, Manchester. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36(2), 238-252.
Gregson, N. (2011). Performativity, corporeality and the politics of ship disposal. Journal of Cultural Economy, 4(2), 137-156.
Rosner, D. K., & Ames, M. (2014). Designing for repair?: Infrastructures and materialities of breakdown. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing (pp. 319-331).

J.

Le 20 nov. 2017 à 21:41, Lee Vinsel <lee.vinsel at gmail.com<mailto:lee.vinsel at gmail.com>> a écrit :
Hi Everybody,

This is a great thread. I haven't been able to read every post, but in case no one mentions it, I wanted to give a nod to this article by Ashley Carse:

Carse, Ashley. "Nature as infrastructure: Making and managing the Panama Canal watershed." Social Studies of Science 42, no. 4 (2012): 539-563.

He has a book on the same topic, but if article-length pieces are what you are looking for, this is the place to go. I'm looking forward to teaching it in my Maintainers graduate seminar next semester, paired with David Biggs' Quagmire.

Best,

Lee

On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 12:43 PM, Irani, Lilly <lirani at ucsd.edu<mailto:lirani at ucsd.edu>> wrote:
Fernando Dominguez Rubio, "Preserving the unpreservable: docile and unruly objects at MoMA"
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-014-9233-4
puts questions of care and maintenance at the center of sociological/philosophical concerns about cultural categories, social order, and ontology

My own piece looks at how Amazon Mechanical Turk formats some workers as distanced "infrastructure" so other workers can program and "innovate" more intensively (so labor as environment):
https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/114/1/225/3763/Difference-and-Dependence-among-Digital-Workers?redirectedFrom=fulltext

On Nov 20, 2017, at 6:13 AM, Greene, Ann Norton <angreene at sas.upenn.edu<mailto:angreene at sas.upenn.edu>> wrote:
Dear Maintainers,
I am teaching a new course next semester about infrastructures and environments, intended as a special topics seminar, so it will be both introductory but with upper level students, and focused on research skills via several short projects.
I could really use some recommendations on readings, especially essay length.  At the moment I am planning to do historical case studies (the course is called "Waters, Roads and Wires)
and readings so far include Chris Jones' _Routes of Power_ and Julie Cohn's _The Grid_.  I have some railroad, energy and mass transit people in Philadelphia to draw on as outside speakers.

Thanks in advance,
Ann

Ann N. Greene
Associate Director for Undergraduate Studies & Assistant Professor (Adj.)
Dept of History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania

Office Hours Fall 2017
M 1-3 TW 10-11, TWR 2-4

Author, _Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America_ (Harvard, 2008)
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