Lecture: What is infrastructure? How to do critical Infrastructure studies.

Solo Writing: Describe some part of communication infrastructure near you (phone poles, wireless routers, cell-phone towers, etc.) What connotations, good and bad, does it have for you? Where did those associations come from?

Group Discussion: Develop your own definition of infrastructure. Based on that definition, how does infrastructure change the way we interpret the world around us?

Class Discussion: Based on the readings, what are the risks of ignoring infrastructure? Should infrastructure be invisible?

Lecture: How to do critical surveillance studies (+ cultural turn), technological ownership

Group Close Reading Activity: examine the role of vigilantism and location data in Pickard. Based on this event, discuss how can location data be misused.

Class Discussion: How should surveillance technologies, policing, and citizenship interact? How do we avoid 1) an authoritarian state and 2) vigilantism?

Writing workshop: begin your essay by conducting a close reading of a short passage from Pickard or Haviland. Carefully examine the language’s form and style.

Lecture: Surveillance and the institution of slavery, Grapevine Telegraph

Solo Writing: describe Lizzie’s response to the telegraph wire. How does it reflect her experience of slavery? 

Group Activity: Examine the infrastructural technology assigned to your group from the Bound for Glory menu. Explain how it transformed the life of one Black American.

Class Discussion: How do you design equity into infrastructural tech? Is there such a thing as a racist infrastructure? 

Lecture: from telegraph to the tracking cookie, liquid surveillance

Solo Activity: work on digital surveillance audit

Group Activity: discuss the difference between the state (FBI) surveillance discussed Maxwell and the horizontal (peer-to-peer) surveillance of social media.

Writing Workshop: craft a thesis for your essay that connects telegraphic surveillance with contempory digital surveillance.

For this essay, students will compare the role of the telegraph with a contemporary communication technology.  Through close readings of a pair of technological “encounters,” one historical and one contemporary, students will explore the social and psychological effects of surveillance on American life. By comparing the two encounters, students will describe the evolving role of communication infrastructure on American conceptions of home, privacy, mobility, or environment.