Syllabus

ENGL 89600/DHUM 78000 - Knowledge Infrastructures

CUNY Graduate Center | Mondays 4:15PM-6:15PM | Room 3310A | 2/3/4 credits

Course Website (Public)

Course Group (Private)

Contact Info

Dr. Matthew K. Gold

mgold@gc.cuny.edu

Meetings: Please contact Oliver Sage to make an appointment with me. Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you want to talk.

Room 5307.04

Course Description

Infrastructure is all around us, rarely remarked upon. Indeed, the latent state of infrastructure is part of what marks it as such; as Susan Leigh Starr has noted, infrastructure studies involves the study of "boring things."

This class will explore the emerging nexus of critical infrastructure studies and critical university studies, focusing on how they can be combined with digital humanities approaches to explore the infrastructure of scholarly knowledge. From our libraries to our journals to our conferences to our operating systems to our use of social media, scholars communicate through an entanglement of corporate and commercial interests. Beyond the obviously problematic commercial infrastructures built by predatory publishers and corporate conglomerates such as Elsevier, scholars routinely depend on for-profit publication venues and commercial journals to disseminate their work, and often use enterprise online platforms to teach their classes.

As a set of alternatives to the commercialized infrastructure of knowledge dissemination in the academy, the course will consider open access publication models, free software development, and university press publishing. Even as we explore such alternatives, we will critique them, considering the ways that such alternatives themselves depend upon commercial technical stacks, and considering whether these alternatives are equally available and accessible across the globe.

Topics to be explored include: introductions to critical infrastructure studies and critical university studies; the environmental impact of the cloud; the free software movement; academic publishing models; constructing open platforms. Students in the class will explore publishing platforms collaboratively created by CUNY and other partners, including the CUNY Academic Commons and Manifold, as well as others such as Humanities Commons and Zotero. The goal of the class, in the end, is to ask students to consider how and where their own scholarly knowledge is distributed, by whom, and under what terms.

Learning Objectives

  • Explore and become familiar with the fields of critical infrastructure studies, digital humanities, and critical university studies

  • Become more aware of the knowledge systems and infrastructures we participate in

  • Consider the materiality of technical infrastructure and its entanglements in social, political, and interpersonal contexts

  • Make a collective intervention into the knowledge infrastructure of The Graduate Center and/or CUNY

  • Devote time and space to reading, thinking, and writing

Student Disability Services

It is Graduate Center and CUNY policy to provide appropriate accommodations to students with disabilities. Any student with a disability who may need accommodations in this class is advised to speak directly to the manager of Student Disability Services, located in Student Affairs, room 7301, or call 212-817-7400 as early in the semester as possible. All discussions will remain confidential.

Requirements and Assignments

Weekly Reading and Discussion:

Students should complete all weekly readings in advance of the class meeting and should take an active part in class discussions.

Blog Posts and Class Discussions

Each week, one student will write a response to the assigned readings, to be posted by Sunday morning the day before the class in which those readings will be discussed. These posts should offer a brief 1-2 paragraph response to the course texts and then should provide a set of 4-5 questions for group discussion. The post may also provide links to relevant related readings and resources. In class that day, that student will frame and initiate our discussion in class that week. Sign up for slots here.

Other assignments should be posted to the blog as suggested below. Generally, we should try to use our course blog as a way to share information with each other and anyone else following the course from afar. Students who prefer to post privately may use our agreed-upon password to protect their posts.

Personal Narrative

Write a short (~500 word) blog post about some aspect of your personal knowledge infrastructure. You might think about how you keep track of citations, how you take notes, how you store/annotate academic articles, how you access academic texts, what systems you use to write, which platforms you use to search for academic articles, how you find new work in your field. In your post, do some work to extend your knowledge of the infrastructure surrounding your topic/tool/platform and reflect a bit on your choices. What systems does your chosen method rely upon? What aspects are you in control of, and what are you not? What alternatives exist, and why might or might not you want to consider them?

Trace a Knowledge Infrastructure

In the spirit of Miriam Posner's explorations of the infrastructure of the supply chain, document the material basis of a knowledge infrastructure of some kind. You might explore, for instance, a journal in your field. Who publishes it? What publication platform is used to publish the work? Who owns the systems of distribution? What agreements are formed between the publisher and universities to provide access to the publication? What kinds of legal contracts or agreements can you unearth? What kind of labor is involved in the production of the journal? Similar analysis might be performed on learning management systems, university-procured services and contracts, and buildings and spaces. To complete the assignment, please post a short (~500-750 word) blog post and make an informal presentation on your topic to the class

Collective Intervention in GC/CUNY Knowledge Infrastructures (Final Project)

Through class discussions, we will come to a consensus on an intervention that we will collectively make into the knowledge infrastructures at the GC or in CUNY.

Students should complete a 500-word reflection on the collective intervention, to be posted on the course blog, due December 15.

Grading

Regular participation in our class discussions and online spaces is expected and essential. All students will receive a grade of A for completing the assignments associated with their differential credit requirements. Students who are unable to complete assignments associated with differential credit requirements should write a short self-assessment, to be shared with me, explaining the grade they would like to receive for this course. For more on this grading policy, please see recent work on the topic of ungrading.

Differential Credit Requirements:

  • 2 credits: 1 discussion lead + all assignments except Personal Narrative and Trace a Knowledge Infrastructure
  • 3 credits: 1 discussion lead + all assignments except Trace a Knowledge Infrastructure
  • 4 credits: 2 discussion leads + all assignments

Reading Schedule

items marked PDF will be uploaded to our course group

August 28 (Monday) – Points of Departure

September 4 (Monday) – no class. GC closed

September 11 (Monday) – The Infrastructural Lens

  • Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure." American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 43.4, 1999, pp. 377-391. PDF file.

  • Philip, Kavita. "The Internet Will Be Decolonized." Your Computer is On Fire, edited by Thomas S. Mullaney et al., The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2021, pp. 91-115. PDF file.

  • Larkin, Brian, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 42, 2013, pp. 327-343. PDF file.

  • Lisa Parks, “‘Stuff You Can Kick’: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures” Between Humanities and the Digital, edited by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg, The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2015, pp. 355-373. PDF file.

  • Liu, Alan. “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity (book in progress).” 2016. doi:10.21972/G2B663. https://dev-liu-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/drafts-for-against-the-cultural-singularity.

September 18 (Monday) – Hard and Soft Infrastructures: Logistics, Standards, Supply Chains

Personal Narrative Assignment Due

September 25 (Monday) – no class. GC closed

October 2 (Monday) – Infrastructure, Technology, Ecology

  • Jackson, Stephen. "Rethinking Repair." Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie et al., MIT Press Scholarship Online, 2014. pp. 221-239. PDF file.

  • Mukherjee, Rahul. Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (selections). 2020. PDF file.

  • Lally, Nick et al. “Computational parasites and hydropower: A political ecology of Bitcoin mining on the Columbia River.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, vol. 5, no. 1, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619867608.

  • Ensmenger, Nathan. "The Cloud is a Factory." Your Computer is On Fire, edited by Thomas S. Mullaney et al., The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2021, pp. 314-336. PDF file.

October 9 (Monday) – no class. GC closed

October 10 (Tuesday) – classes follow a Monday schedule -- Approaching the Knowledge Commons

  • Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom, editors. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (selections). 2006. Please read Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrum, "Introduction: An Overview of the Knowledge Commons"; David Bollier, "The Growth of the Commons Paradigm"; Nancy Kranich, "Countering Enclosure: Reclaiming the Knowledge Commons"

  • Harvey, David. "The Future of the Commons." Radical History Review, vol. 2011, no. 109, 2011, pp. 101–107, https://davidharvey.org/media/Harvey_on_the_Commons.pdf.

  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick, "Working in Public." In Generous Thinking. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

  • Lawerence Lessig. "Free Culture" (video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVk77VQuPAY

Trace a Knowledge Infrastructure Assignment Due

October 16 (Monday) – The Knowledge Commons, Monetized

October 23 (Monday) – Knowledge Instructures of the Global South

October 30 (Monday) – Global South Continued ; Racial Infrastructures

November 6 (Monday) – Platform Infrastructures

  • Edwards, Paul N. "Platforms are Infrastructures on Fire." Your Computer is On Fire, edited by Thomas S. Mullaney et al., The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2021, pp. 314-336. PDF file.

  • Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism (selections), 2016. PDF file.

  • Laura Kurgan, Dare Brawley, Brian House, Jia Zhang, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Homophily: The Urban History of an Algorithm.” e-flux (October 2019) https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/are-friends-electric/289193/homophily-the-urban-history-of-an-algorithm/

  • Zuboff, Shoshana. Age of Surveillance Capitalism (selections), 2018. PDF file.

November 13 (Monday) – Algorithmic Infrastructures

  • Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (selections), 2016. PDF file.

November 20 (Monday) – University Infrastructures

November 27 (Monday) – The Open Pedagogy and The Big Business of EdTech: Looking at the LMS Market

Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pp 71-77. https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf

Mark Brenden. "Learning and Management during and after the Pandemic: Reading Student Resistance to LMS." Pedagogy 1 April 2023; 23 (2): 297–309. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-10296007 (available with CUNY login)

Phil Hill, "Why Instructure’s News Matters: Market history." On EdTech Newsletter. November 18, 2019. https://onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/why-instructures-news-matters-market-history

Michael Feldstein. "Instructure’s Proposed Acquisition is a Bad Risk for Everyone." eLiterate. January 5, 2020. https://eliterate.us/instructures-proposed-acquisition-is-a-bad-risk-for-everyone/

Further Resources (please skim):

Phil Hill, "State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: Year-End 2022 Edition." On EdTech Newsletter. January 31, 2023. https://onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/why-instructures-news-matters-market-history

Phil Hill, "LMS Market Changes: SUNY announces switch from Blackboard Learn to D2L Brightspace." On EdTech Newsletter. October 04, 2021. https://onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/why-instructures-news-matters-market-history

Jeffrey R. Young. "As Instructure Changes Ownership, Academics Worry Whether Student Data Will Be Protected." EdSurge. Jan 17, 2020. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-01-17-as-instructure-changes-ownership-academics-worry-whether-student-data-will-be-protected

Global Market Insights. "Learning Management System (LMS) Market." (summary). July 2023. https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/learning-management-system-lms-market

December 4 (Monday) – Collective Intervention Work

Project Lab

December 11 (Monday) – Collective Intervention Presentation and Discussion

Collective Intervention Due

December 15

Reflections on Collective Intervention Due

Assignment: write 2-3 pages (500-750 words, roughly) reflecting on your participation in the Collective intervention, putting that participation and the project as a whole within the context of your work in the course and your interests in the subject of the class moving forward. Some questions to consider: what parts of the project most interested you? What parts of the class might you be able to pursue in your work moving forward?

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