Technologies, Operations, and Infrastructures

SOC-STD 98TO Subject & Catalog Number

How do we research technology? What is the material difference between studying ‘technology’ versus technologies? To what extent are different technologies comparable as technologies? What do we learn about technology by studying it? Why do we pursue this knowledge? What might it mean to be indifferent to technology, its aims, and its impacts? Is there any such thing as technology?

In this tutorial, we will explore technology, technologies, and the technological as a genealogically unique point of departure for studying the relational forms and formats through which we come to understand the social and act socially. If the inheritance of Martin Heidegger inspires an approach to technology which takes it as an abstraction, as an index of modernity, as a modality of relation in which the world is captured as a resource, a broad range of work in the social and humanistic sciences explores the how of technical activity, relations, and interactions. What happens when we see air as media, cities as computers, screens as culture, or race as infrastructure? What are the stakes of doing so? When we attempt to define technology, when we list examples of technological phenomena, what is the question we are seeking to answer? This course will center methodological experimentation, drawing on anthropology, geography, urban studies, science and technology studies, media studies, architecture, and art practice as well as guest lectures and workshops. This is a junior tutorial.