Infrastructure Fieldnotes
Engaging the City through Reading, Research, and Representations
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2641545 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Scott Ro, Scott Ross (0000-0001-9421-9908, Washington University in St. Louis, corresponding author), Alexandra Groth (0000-0002-6690-9327, George Washington University), Swasti Shah (George Washington University), Anissa Sterner (George Washington University), Abigail Francis (0009-0005-6032-823X, George Washington University), Denali Graham, D L Graham (George Washington University) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2024-07-31 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Teaching and Learning Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2641-4260 • E-ISSN: 2641-4260 |
| Publisher | California Digital Library (CDL) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5070/t37161875 |
| OpenAlex | W4401162214 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
As part of a recent undergraduate seminar on infrastructure, students completed weekly exercises dubbed “infrastructure fieldnotes.” Going beyond conventional discussion board posts or reading responses, exercise prompts incorporated reading analysis, methods practice, writing prompts, and experiments in multimodal representation as students engaged with urban planning and quotidian experiences of infrastructure and made sense of the infrastructures that enable and structure city life. In this research article, the instructor for the course offers a preliminary presentation of the assignment’s structure and pedagogical objectives, followed by an analysis of how some prompts influenced classroom discussions by creating common points of reference and revealing different experiences of the campus and city. This discussion is followed by five student contributions on different aspects of the assignment. Some take up specific prompts to demonstrate how they created openings for engagement with course material, some reflect on how exercises enabled students to cultivate new kinds of awareness or attention to infrastructure, and others extend the fieldnotes project beyond the class to show what kinds of analysis endured after the course ended. Altogether, these student analyses demonstrate and reflect on the utility of sustained, open-ended prompts for student engagement with course material and concepts in an urban campus
Ethnography · Fieldnotes · Linguistics · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Computer Science · Medicine · Psychology · Water Governance and Infrastructure
Seeing Like a State
Fluid technologies
STS beyond the “modern infrastructure ideal”
The felt value of reading zines
The Ethnography of Infrastructure
Seeing Like a StateHow Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
Data centers as infrastructural in-betweens
| Highly cited | No |
|---|