Reading
For this week, please prioritize the Susan Leigh Star article and chapters 1 and 2 of the Bakke book. The introduction and afterword of the Bakke book are also great if you can get to them. (I’ve included the whole book.)
• Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”, American Behavioral Scientist, 1999
• Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future, Introduction, chapters 1 & 2, and Afterword
• (Optional.) Lisa Parks, “‘Stuff You Can Kick’: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures”, Between Humanities and the Digital, edited by Svensson and Goldberg, MIT Press, 2015
• The syllabus also lists Abdoumaliq Simone’s “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg” for this week, but I think this will fit better if instead we read it during week 12.
Class artifacts
Tuesday, February 15: Reading discussion. Presentation slides.
In class we watched “Principles of Electricity” (1945) from the General Electric Film Catalog, linked here. At one point I also referenced Ingrid Burrington’s Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure (2016), which I consider to be an excellent primer on learning to “see” infrastructure in public space. Email me at malmgree@newschool.edu if you’d like a PDF of the book!
Thursday, February 17: Technical tutorial; links to come.