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Alkan, Aybike
Weber, Heike
Starting from the last decades of the 20th century, History of Technology and Science and Technology Studies have intensively studied infrastructures. This growing literature on infrastructures has shown us how social, political, and ecological values are embedded into our physical environments, and how they enable the redistribution of things, resources and power across time and space. In doing so, this literature has also revealed the diverse reasons why both, the colonial state and the nation-state, have a profound interest in infrastructure construction and control.
This course offers students an introduction to the relationship between infrastructure and politics: How have infrastructures shaped politics in different historical contexts, and vice versa? How have they (re)produced or disrupted various hierarchical power relations structured along the lines of ethnicity-race, class, and gender? What kind of roles have infrastructures played in colonialism or nationalism? And how have they been involved in political issues such as rural dispossession, environmental injustice, migration, or data governance? In this vein, the course explores the fundamental aspects of the politics of infrastructure with a range of theoretical approaches and empirical sites.
The course will familiarize students with historical developments relevant to infrastructural politics as well as with key theoretical debates in the areas of History of Technology and STS. The main language of the seminar will be English, while your group and discussion work (or the “Hausarbeit”) can include or be in German.
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