• Joniak-Lüthi Agnieszka

• Joniak-Lüthi Agnieszka

Although roads and other infrastructures are ubiquitous, until recently they have existed only on the margins of anthropological enquiry. This has changed in the past decade, as the anthropology of infrastructure has become a burgeoning debate within our discipline.

In this seminar, we will focus on selected examples of infrastructures around the world and analyze how they are entangled in local politics and the social and cultural life. We will study how class differences manifest in the traffic on the Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul, how roads in rural Peru expand but also contest state power, how the Apartheid power relations persist in water-meters in South Africa, and we will also learn about the role that the land-knowledge of the Indigenous people at the US-Mexico border play in drug infrastructures. Further, we will use infrastructure as a critical lens to reflect on global travels of humans, power, resources and cultural ideas.

• Understand the debates in the field of anthropology of infrastructure in order to apply them in the analysis of the contemporary societies
• Combine findings from theoretical readings with own fieldwork material collected in Fribourg.
• Learn how to use comparative concepts to analyse the research material and embed it in theoretical debates.
• Formulate and ask reflected and critical questions, give constructive feedback.
• Further develop discussing and presenting skills in English.

Workload and assessment:

The course language is English (but your English does not have to be perfect to participate). Active and regular participation, including the weekly lecture of the course literature, is part of the workload. The seminar also comprises a research exercise: the students (individually or in small teams) will choose an infrastructure in Fribourg or in the surrounding region, conduct a brief ethnographic research and present the result of that research in the class.