This course will be fully digital due to infection prevention measures.
Candidates who have already completed SOSANT9100A and SOSANT9100B are welcome to sign up for this course, but will not hand in a final paper (exam) as one may only receive credits once per course code.
This PhD course explores anthropological approaches to the study of infrastructures and investigates connected, critical perspectives on the concept of the “global”, while putting it into conversation with thinking about ecology.
In dialogue with an emerging body of work that spans the humanities and social sciences, anthropologists have developed what Appel, Anand and Gupta have called an “infrastructure toolbox” – that is, a set of methodological and theoretical tools related to the study of the basic physical structures that shape our everyday lives. Approached anthropologically, infrastructures can be understood as “the architecture for circulation” (Larkin 2013); they are both material structures and spaces that enable ever-new flows and connections to emerge. As such, they potentially incorporate both ‘hard infrastructures’ such as transport networks or water systems and other organizing networks such as carbon infrastructures, accounting and financial systems. Infrastructure is also an organizational concept—an ascendant idea that is mobilized to do important work in the world (Carse 2017).
Large-scale infrastructures such as roads, shipyards, ports, electrical networks, or pipeline projects often involve the promise of development, progress, and growth to the people affected by them, and are connected in intricate ways to notions around “the global”. And yet, as has been demonstrated in a flurry of monographs on these systems over recent years, such “global” promises are rarely fulfilled. In some ways, the gradual corrosion of these lofty assurances around connectivity, progress, and speed, amidst the “general sense of evaporating futurity in the medium of corroded pipes and broken concrete” (Anand, Gupta, Appel 2018), strangely resembles the unclear potency of “infrastructure” as a major theoretical concept in anthropology over recent years.
In addition, a parallel, yet not too often interlinked, conversation about ecological globalization (which focuses, for instance, on commodity chains, world ecologies, invasive and feral species, exchanges, mono-cultural landscapes) will also be drawn upon in this course. We shall delve into how, for anthropology, the concept of “infrastructure” - with its political and economic valences and connections to ecology – has seemed to promise new understandings of global political, economic and ecological processes. Why infrastructure? Why now? Can a focus on infrastructure overcome the analytical shortcomings ascribed to earlier theoretical concepts designed to make sense of the contemporary situation (e.g. “global flows”)? To ask these questions about infrastructure and anthropology is to raise broader questions about the use values and life cycles of concepts and theories in the discipline. We will also address in this workshop how these considerations have implications for how we frame our research questions when it comes to fieldwork.
This course, arranged by University of Oslo’s Department of Social Anthropology, is part of the “Ecological Globalisation: Domestication beyond Control” project’s PhD series, funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
Participants and organisation: This course combines lectures and discussions of theory with analytic explorations of PhD students’ work-in-progress. Brief lectures by the faculty will initiate each of the sessions on key themes and clusters of reading, but the bulk of time will be devoted to critical discussion of the readings and their usefulness for students’ research projects.
Sign-up deadline: Students for the course need to sign up by March 24th. UiO students sign up via StudentWeb. All other students sign up by sending an email to elisabeth.schober@sai.uio.no (with cc to henvendelser@sai.uio.no). Include name, working title of your thesis, abstract of thesis/chapter (300 words), when you plan to submit, your institutional affiliation and 1-2 page document outlining how your interest in the course and your PhD research relates to the issues in the course outline. Priority will be given to PhD candidates based in Norway and at Aarhus University. Other PhD candidates will be admitted if space permits.
Preparations and requirements: Students are expected to have read the course bibliography before the first day of the course, and to come prepared to give short oral presentations of their ongoing work and how it is related to the course. Further instructions for these activities will be circulated along with the readings, by March 29th.
After the course, participants will submit a written essay for evaluation (6-7000 words) by September 1st. We encourage students to pre-circulate first drafts of their essays before the course, if they wish to do so. The essay should evidence thoughtful engagement with the course materials that have been most useful in shaping the student’s analysis and writing. Full participation in the course, including pass on the final essay, equals 5 ECTS credits. It will also be possible for students to participate in course activities without submitting the final essay, and without credits.