INFO 6940

Spring 2022
Wednesdays, 11:20am-1:50pm
Gates 122 (Ithaca)/Bloomberg Center 497 (NYC)
[By university policy, meetings on 1/26 and 2/2 will be via zoom]
3 credits

This course looks at the challenges and opportunities of infrastructure – both digital and non-digital – from the perspective of rural communities. In all communities, the available infrastructures, such as water supplies, roads, telephones, radio, and internet, scaffold the practices that community members engage in. Across the global North and South, rural and remote communities are generally characterized by less built-out infrastructure than is available in urban centers.  Compared to urban places, infrastructures in remote and rural places are more likely to be created by residents themselves, more prone to breakdown, and slower to repair. The patchiness and fragility of rural and remote infrastructure shape some of rural places’ unique properties. They also raises challenges for rural residents in a metronormative world, where economic and social participation may be predicated on an assumption of infrastructural accessibility which breaks down in the countryside.

In this course, we will examine how and why rural infrastructure is shaped by technological sensibilities that tend to put cities first, and reflect on the potential for alternatives. One concern in this course will be the current and future development of digital infrastructures. We’ll move beyond the simple binary of the “digital divide” of haves and have-nots to ask what hopes and dreams are invested in digital infrastructures, whose perspectives they embody, and what possibilities and consequences arise with tying remote and rural regions more deeply into the global digital world.

We will understand and analyze these aspects of digital infrastructure within a much longer history of technological modernization of the countryside. Since the Industrial Revolution, rural areas have often been framed as a terrain for improvement, pitting technological advancement against an ‘uneducated’ and ‘backwards’ rural populace stuck in traditional ways. Key questions and issues we will examine include: What characterizes infrastructural realities in rural places, and why? How does infrastructure and the processes of its development shape, constrain, or provide new possibilities for rural life? How are rural regions and peoples understood by often urban designers and providers of infrastructure, and what consequences does this have for the impact of the infrastructure they develop? What forms of infrastructural innovation are emerging from rural communities? What would it mean to center rural values, lifestyles, and perspectives in infrastructural design? To answer these questions, we will blend perspectives from history, qualitative social science, and critically engaged design.

A secondary goal of this course is to provide insights into another form of infrastructure: the infrastructure undergirding your scholarly life.  Like all infrastructure, the habits and tools that are key to success as a scholar are often hidden from view. In this course, we’ll expose this hidden curriculum, including topics such as setting up your own scholarly archive, project management, and tactics for navigating the emotional highs and lows of the scholarly experience.