[Themaintainers] readings for infrastructure course

Wed Nov 22 08:04:44 EST 2017

Thank you to everyone for their generous and quick responses.  The range of materials is great, and you also reminded me of some things I already know and had overlooked.
I still feel the “strange combination of exhilaration and despair” but in a much better way!
Ann

On Nov 21, 2017, at 3:19 PM, Camille E. Acey <connect at camilleacey.com<mailto:connect at camilleacey.com>> wrote:

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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Camille E. Acey
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"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." - Audre Lorde
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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)

391 Claudia Cohen Hall
249 S. 36th Street
Philadelphia, PA

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