Concrete and Wires: A Sociology of Infrastructure
Open your eyes, look around you, and see the invisible. The modern world is stalked by giants made of concrete and wires, but which we often fail to see. See the roads that dominate our urban spaces, posing perpetual perils and facilitating the local, national, and global transit of goods, people, languages, and cultures. See the water works that provide—or fail to provide—the lifeblood of your organic body and the fuel for social and economic transformation. See the electrical currents that power our home appliances, our workplaces, our schools and hospitals, our prisons. See the conduits of knowledge traced by paperwork, mail deliveries, bureaucracies, and big data. All of these systems are infrastructures: structures that move matter, and shape our world. They trap us, control us, open us to new possibilities, and reveal vulnerabilities. They make possible the emergent properties of people. They make possible society. In this new course, we embark on a journey of sociological exploration, using a study of infrastructure to deepen our understanding of colonialism, race, gender, the state, capitalism, democracy, indigeneity, and ecology. We ask how we shape infrastructure, and we ask how infrastructure shapes us. Welcome to the world we made.
Introduction to Sociology
This course is designed to give new students reason to fall in love with sociology, cause to be vexed by the contradictions it reveals, and opportunity to interrogate their existing notions of the social world. Students will be asked to get off the fence, banish “that’s just the way it is” explanations, and explode “there is no alternative” thinking. We begin by becoming familiar with the three novel social formations that constitute modernity—the state, capital, and civil society—then develop a range of sociological tools to grapple with critical social issues including race, immigration, criminalization, gender, sexuality, technology, and ecology. Students will leave this course feeling unsettled, inspired, and well-equipped to approach their world as knowledgable social actors.
Sociological Methods
Studying sociological research methods equips students with indispensable skills for functioning in this crucial juncture in the story of humanity. What evidence we gather, what we make of that evidence, and what we do thus informed will have world historic consequences. In teaching sociological methods, I draw on epistemology, philosophy of science, and anthropology literatures to fortify sociological practice. Topics include:
Ontology vs. Epistemology, Objectivity vs. Subjectivity
Inductive and Deductive Reasoning
Interpretivism and Post-Positivism
Truth vs. Knowledge
Causal, Argument, and Construct Validity
Levels of Pre-Specification and Mixed Methods
Ethnography, Participant Observation, and Community-Based Participatory Action Research
In-Depth Interviewing
Survey Methods
Frequentist vs. Bayesian Statistics
Research Ethics