This week we’ll consider how anthropologists have engaged with networks of various types, and what methodological challenges and opportunities such distributed systems present. We’ll also consider how the study of networks affords scholars, activists, policymakers, etc., a means of examining critical issues like identity and equity. How are networked technologies creating systems of both opportunity and social control? How might attention to such concerns promote more intentional technological development?
Guest: 5:00-5:45: Joshua Breitbart, Deputy Chief Technology Officer, NYC (Rescheduled from Feb. 3)
Guest: 6:00 to end of class: Ruha Benjamin (Skype)
To be reviewed before class:
- Anthropology of Networked Infrastructures: Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta, “Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure,” in Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds., The Promise of Infrastructure (Duke University Press, 2018): 1-38 [don’t be discouraged if you’re a little lost on pp 8-10 😉; stop at the bottom of page 20, before “Infra Politics”].
- Experimental Network Ethnographies: See Unknown Fields’ filmic and exhibitionary documentation of their thematic multi-sited ethnographies, including their 2017 research on the global networks of fast fashion.
- Anthropology of Digital Networks: Daniel Miller, “Digital Anthropology,” Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (2018).
- Network Ideologies: Ruha Benjamin, Are Robots Racist? {video 23:23}.
- Social Planning of Network Infrastructure: Greta Byrum and Joshua Breitbart, “Wireless Organizing in Detroit: Churches as networked sites in under-resourced urban areas,” First Monday 18:11 (2013) [consider: what are the parallels between anthropology and planning?].
- Post a reading response if you’ve signed up to do so?
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EXAMPLES WE’LL AIM TO ADDRESS IN CLASS, AND WHICH YOU’RE WELCOME TO EXAMINE IN ADVANCE:
- Media Manipulation: Data & Society Research Institute’s work on “media manipulation.” Read the very short executive summary of their “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online” report — the product of years of collaborative ethnographic research — and skim the full report.
- Facial Recognition: Clare Garvie, “Garbage In, Garbage Out: Face Recognition on Flawed Data,” Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology (May 16, 2019); Fight for the Future, “Detroit Activist Exposes Dangers of Facial Recognition” (featuring Tawana Petty and Clare Garvie), YouTube (August 6, 2019) {video: 2:32}.
- Surveillance / Profiling / Predictive Policing: Chris Gilliard, “Caught In the Spotlight,” Urban Omnibus (January 8, 2020); Rani Molla, “How Amazon’s Ring is Creating a Surveillance Network via Video Doorbells,” Recode (January 10, 2020); Rashida Richardson, Jason M. Schultz, and Kate Crawford, “Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice,” New York University Law Review 94:15 (2019): 16-55.
SUPPLEMENTAL RESOURCES:
- Nikhil Anand, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2017).
- Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019).
- Laura Forlano, “Making Waves: Urban Technology and the Co-Production of Place,” First Monday 18:11 (November 2013).
- Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge (Cornell University Press, 2015).
- Kregg Hetherington, “Introduction: Keywords of the Anthropocene,” in Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019): 1-13.
- Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-43.
- Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2008).
- Shannon Mattern, “Waves and Wires: Cities of Electric Sound” in Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
- Rafico Ruiz, “Arctic Infrastructures: Tele Field Notes,” Communication 3:1 (2013): DOI: 0.7275/R5D21VHD.
- Juan Francisco Salazar, “Polar Infrastructures” in Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway, and Genevieve Bell, eds., The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (Routledge, 2016): 11 pp.
- Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist 43:3 (1999): 377-91.
- Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Networks (Duke University Press, 2015).