Future Infrastructure: From Research to Pedagogy

By Surojit Kayal

Origin In Spring 2023, my colleague and former fellow of the Future Infrastructure cluster, Stephen Borunda and I were fortunate to teach a class titled ”Deserts, Islands, and Other Energy Infrastructures” at the UCSB College of Creative Studies through their Crossroads 2.0 fellowship program. We had already been working for the cluster for several years, carrying out partnerships with global organizations and compiling resources on the emerging field of critical infrastructure studies. One persistent question that came up during this period was how to carry the conversation to a broader audience and with our students: in other words, how to teach the topic of infrastructure. Part of that difficulty stems from the tricky nature of infrastructures themselves. Infrastructures are often designed to be ignored and forgotten: a car is more interesting than the road or the gas it runs on, a film is more interesting than its production logistics, a good meal is more interesting than the global supply chain that undergirds it. As Susan Leigh Star famously proclaims, infrastructures are invisible until they break down. And yet, there is no denying the enormous role infrastructures play in shaping modern life. How then to make them visible and interesting for our students? What would be an appropriate pedagogy of infrastructure?

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This question led us to the CCS call for applications for an interdisciplinary class on topics around social or environmental justice to be taught by two graduate students from different departments. Stephen and I put together a proposal with energy and the environment as the two main qualifiers, partly to give a more concrete focus to the larger field of critical infrastructure studies, and partly because energy is an interest of ours. We put “Deserts” and “Islands” in the course title to signal the larger environmental dimension of infrastructures and allude to the two terrains that we both respectively work with.

Overview

We were fortunate to be selected and invited to develop the syllabus and teach it the following quarter. The syllabus design took collaborative work over many drafts as we experimented with design, assignments, and texts. Our central questions were: how do energy infrastructures intersect with social and environmental realities? Who are included or excluded in the design and worldview of energy infrastructures? How can we sense, study, and represent infrastructural systems? And finally, how can we build better infrastructures for more just futures? The questions were not random but were chosen as key lenses for ecologies, power, perception, and future. We structured the class across three conceptual units. Our initial plan was to divide it across the topics of “Extraction, Distribution, and Accidents” as three temporal points in the lifecycle of an infrastructure. However, we realized that “Accident” is a modality of “Distribution” (or its failure) so we replaced “Accident” with “Future” as the third unit. Within the units, each week covered a particular energy system. “Extraction” had weeks devoted to coal, oil and minerals. “Distribution” had weeks on dams and hydroelectricity, the electric grid, and nuclear energy. Finally, two weeks in the “Future” unit covered various forms of “green” energy systems.

Approaches

Our texts and classroom activities had three guiding principles. The first was a global and postcolonial framework of infrastructure. Infrastructures are rarely locally contained; they often sit at the center of transnational and geopolitical negotiations. Globalization is in many ways an infrastructural achievement whether through the pipelines of oil that runs from Azerbaijan to London (Marriott and Minio-Paluello), or the container ships plowing over the oceans (Khalili), or the undersea cables that enable global data flows (Starosielski). Thus, we sought to represent as many of the global regions in our syllabus as possible. The following is a summary of the regions we covered:

Africa:

Ken Saro-Wiwa. “Chapter 5: The Shell-BP Role,” Genocide in Nigeria (1992).

Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams, Neptune Frost (2021).

R. Lane Clark and Stefan Misceher (dir). Ghana’s Electric Dreams.

Stefan Miescher, “Introduction,” A Dam for Africa (2022).

Gabrielle Hecht. “The African Anthropocene.”

South and South-East Asia:

Mark Nowak and Ian Teh. Coal Mountain Elementary (2009)

Victor Seow. “Sights of Extraction.”

Tanmay Das and Malay Tewari. “Resistance Report: Deocha-Pachami Coal Mine Project.”

Arundhati Roy. “The Greater Common Good.”

Jason Cons. “The Times of Chokepoints.” Limn, Issue 10

Middle East:

James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello, The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London, Verso, 2012

Asia Pacific:

Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, “The Myth of Isolates: Ecosystem Ecologies in the Nuclear Pacific”

Dan Lin & Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, “Anointed” (2018)

North America and the Arctic:

Brenda Longfellow and Glenn Richards, Offshore (2013). https://offshore-interactive.com/

UCSB Graduate Students. A Field Guide to Oil in Santa Barbara

Robert Flaherty (dir). Louisiana Story (1958)

Mark Nowak and Ian Teh. Coal Mountain Elementary (2009)

Rafico Ruiz. “Living Arctic Infrastructures.”

Lucien Darjeun Meadows, “Circling Eloh: A Meditation,” New England Review

Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (1952).

Stephen Borunda. “Sensing Radioactive Deserts: Mediating Florae and Rocks in New Mexico’s Anthropocene.”

South America:

Pablo Neruda. “Standard Oil Co.” in The Energy Humanities: An Anthology (2017).

Pablo Neuda. “Anaconda Copper Mining Co,” in Canto General (1950)

Macarena Gomez-Barris. “The Intangibility of the Yasuní,” in The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017).

Unknown Fields. The Breastmilk of the Volcano (2016).

More than leading an infrastructural world tour over the quarter, our aim was to locate energy infrastructures as material sites and means of colonial domination, whether through the extraction of oil in Nigeria by US and European companies, or through US nuclear testing in New Mexico and the Pacific islands.

Interdisciplinarity was our second design principle, as the course was offered through the College of Creative Studies and not affiliated to any particular department. Also, because infrastructures are imagined, negotiated, built, maintained and enjoyed by diverse societal actors, they require an interdisciplinary approach for better understanding. Thus, we sought to incorporate and synthesize texts and resources from multiple disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Our backgrounds in literature, film, and media studies informed a fair amount of literary (Mark Nowak and Ian Teh, Pablo Neuda, Ralph Ellison) and cinematic (Louisiana Story, Neptune Frost) texts; however, we also read from other disciplines such as anthropology (Dominic Boyer, Brian Larkin, Macarena Gomez-Barris), history (Gabrielle Hecht, Stefan Miescher, Timothy Mitchell), cultural studies (Rob Nixon, Elizabeth DeLoughrey), and activist writings (Arundhati Roy, Ken Saro-Wiwa).

The third design principle we adopted was that of multimedia. Because infrastructures are often globally distributed, rendered banal and invisible, they challenge our perception and representation, which necessitates a multimodal approach whereby infrastructures are not only written about but also seen, heard, touched, and felt. This approach led us to incorporate as many genres in our syllabus as possible: poetry, fiction, journalistic writings, documentary films, science fiction, graphic novels, creative nonfiction, zines, and even an interactive film in our syllabus. All these creative forms were however complemented by critical readings for our conceptual development. We decided to use Fueling Culture – a keywords book – as a regular resource while incorporating more scholarly resources on weekly topics.

The multimodal principle also centered our instructional strategies. Because we had a class size of six students, we created a seminar-style class with minimal lecturing and an emphasis on horizontal learning and activities. One activity included in-class screening of films and post-screening discussion. For the week on hydropower, we were also able to invite Prof. Stephan Miescher for a discussion of his six part documentary Ghana’s Electric Dreams together with his book on the same topic. For the week on oil, we visited the UCSB archives to go over historical documents on the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill which were specially commissioned from an archive in Los Angeles for the class. For the week on coal, we did a workshop on cookie mining, which is basically mining chocolate chips from cookies as a critical simulation of coal mining. Finally, on the last day of the class, we collaborated with another class to conduct a zine making workshop. We used the zine as a sort of creative alternative to the normative ECSI forms for course reflection and feedback collection.

Assignments

We included three major assignments for the class that combined creative/critical thinking and collaborative work. For the collaborative part we used “living documents” to track our understandings of the three major class concepts: energy, infrastructure, and environmental justice. We assigned two students per concept to fill the document with weekly responses to that week’s readings and write a synthesis at the end of the course. We ended up with three documents that reflect the evolution of understanding, however, with just two students working on a document, at times there were lulls in its regular maintenance.

We called the midterm assignment “Energy Infrastructure Starter Kits,” inspired by Prof. Alan Liu’s assignment “Critical Infrastructure Starter Kits.” Each student chose a topic pertaining to energy infrastructure, did some research, and created a collection of texts, documents, and other artifacts for someone new to that topic. Students worked on diverse topics from rubber infrastructure to lithium extraction, electric vehicles, mangrove forests, agrivoltaics, and the corn belt. The final project for the class combined a creative and critical approach to research. We worked with the students individually as well as collaboratively to help them develop their projects, which ranged from photo essays to poetry anthology, card games, a YouTube video, and an ArcGIS story map.

Conclusion

The class was a great learning experience for both Stephen and myself. We enjoyed the entire process of design, selection of texts, preparation of lectures, and activities. Students bought into the ideas behind it, worked hard throughout the quarter, and created some wonderful projects. I hope to stay in touch with the students and convert some of their works into potential publications for our Future Infrastructure cluster.