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

Environmental Sociology

The relationship between humans and the nonhuman ecologies is complex, adaptive, and in peril. We are part of and dependent upon the nonhuman network even while altering the environment for our own needs and purposes. As a way of thinking broadly about these interactions, this course addresses the social causes, consequences, and responses to environmental disruption. Throughout the course, students complete a series of “missions” designed to give them first-hand encounters with their human and nonhuman ecologies. In readings and course discussions, students are exposed to the principal themes in environmental sociology, including:

  • Indigeous Dispossession & Enclosures

  • Nature/Culture Divide

  • Contradictions between Ecology and Capitalism

  • Opportunities & Challenges in Environmental Management

  • Production, Excess, & Waste

  • Environmental Inequality

  • Political Economy of Environmental Harms

  • The Role of Technology in Addressing Ecological Collapse

Building Sustainable Communities

This course introduces students to a core focus of Environmental Studies: understanding the roots and consequences of our socioecological crisis so that we may work to build and support ecologically sustainable and socially just, democratic futures. We will examine and interrogate the scholarly evidence concerning the phenomena of socioecological crises and the efforts by community residents, activists, workers, social movements, corporations, and governments to document and address them. We will consider the ways in which human and nonhuman forces interact, collide, collaborate, and are indeed inseparable. While this course is rooted in environmental sociology, it also draws from political science, economics, science and technology studies, philosophy, and the humanities. Over the course of the semester, students will spend time thinking about the following questions:

  • What are the causes of the ecological crisis?

  • What is sustainability?

  • What is community? What is ecology?

  • What role can science and technology play in solutions?

  • How does capitalism interact with ecologies?

  • How does the state interact with ecologies?

  • What economic solutions seem promising?

  • How can different models of governance contribute to positive change?

  • What strategies “from below” have been attempted? What gains have been made through these strategies?