Course Schedule

Thu 01/18

• Infrastructure Examples:
  • Heather Pitts, Racial Bias in Library Cataloging
  • 30 Days At Sea Timelapse
• Susan Leigh Star, “Power, Technology, and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions”
• Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”
• Paul N. Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity”
• Benjamin Bratton, “Introduction” in The Stack alt

Thu 01/25

• Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”
• Joanna Zylinska, “Poetics” from Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene
• Alexis Shotwell, selections from Against Purity
• Anna Tsing, “Arts of Noticing” and “Interlude: Smelling” from The Mushroom at the End of the World (also PDF on eCampus)
• Ingrid Burrington, “A Network of Fragments”
• Benjamin Bratton, “Platform and Stack, Model and Machine” in The Stack alt

Thu 02/01

• Julian Dibbell, “Info Tech of Ancient Democracy”
• Roxanne Mountford, “On Gender and Rhetorical Space”
• Marilyn M Cooper, “The Ecology of Composition”
• Jenny Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies.”
• Mary E. Stuckey, “On Rhetorical Circulation”

Thu 02/08

• Emily Anne Epstein, “What Does the Internet Actually Look Like?”
• Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network
• Benjamin Bratton, “Earth Layer” in The Stack alt

Thu 02/15

• Microsoft, “What is Cloud Computing?”
• Shannon Mattern, “Cloud and Field”
• Plantin et al., “Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook”
• Niels van Doorn, “Platform labor”
• Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, “Platformed racism: the mediation and circulation of an Australian race-based controversy on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube”
• Benjamin Bratton, “Cloud Layer” in The Stack alt

Thu 02/22

• Ingrid Burrington, “Why Amazon’s Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country”
• Ingrid Burrington, “Why Are There So Many Data Centers in Iowa?”
• Ingrid Burrington, “How to See Invisible Infrastructure”
• Casey Boyle, “Pervasive Citizenship through #SenseCommons”
• Benjamin Bratton, “Nomos of the Cloud” in The Stack alt
• Benjamin Bratton, “City Layer” in The Stack alt

Thu 03/01

• Jussi Parrika, selections from What is Media Archaeology?
• Slava Gerovitch, “InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network”
• Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, selections from Minitel: Welcome to the Internet
• Amy Slaton and Janet Abbate, “The Hidden Lives of Standards: Technical Prescriptions and the Transformation of Work in America”
• Benjamin Bratton, “Address Layer” in The Stack alt

Thu 03/08

• Bruno Latour, Aramis
• Benjamin Bratton, “Interface Layer” in The Stack alt

Thu 03/15

No Class

Spring Break

Thu 03/22

• Matthew Kirschenbaum, Track Changes
• Benjamin Bratton, “User Layer” in The Stack alt

Thu 03/29

• Book Review Day!
• Rough Book Report Due
• Bring Four Print Copies To Class

Thu 04/05

• Ridley Scott, The Martian
• Final Book Report Due

Thu 04/12

• Ingrid Burrington, “The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge”
• Shaka McGloten, “Black Data”
• micha cárdenas, “Trans of Color Poetics”
• Laboria Cuboniks, “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation”
• Benjamin Bratton, “The Stack to Come” in The Stack alt
• Conference Proposals Due

Thu 04/19

• Anna Watkins Fisher, “User Be Used”
• Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy
• Benjamin Bratton, “The Black Stack” in The Stack alt

Thu 04/26

• Conference Presentations