Undergraduate Module Descriptor

ANT2112: When Things Fall Apart: Social Infrastructures

This module descriptor refers to the 2022/3 academic year.

Module Aims

The intentions of this module are to understand the importance of infrastructure to societies globally and from there to understand the priorities that infrastructure maintenance indicates. What happens when infrastructure breaks down will be a key focus, as will the systemic inequalities that infrastructure encodes. How are utilities funded, maintained, and repaired? What happens when crises, such as global pandemics, alter infrastructure on a massive scale?

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)
This module's assessment will evaluate your achievement of the ILOs listed here – you will see reference to these ILO numbers in the details of the assessment for this module.
On successfully completing the programme you will be able to:
Module-Specific Skills	1. Demonstrate familiarity with what infrastructure is and how it is maintained 2. Show an understanding of the impact of infrastructure on equity and marginalisation 3. Display an awareness of the relationship between politics and the provision of public services
Discipline-Specific Skills	4. Show an understanding of how qualitative social scientific approaches can be used to study infrastructure 5. Evaluate cross-cultural differences in construction and maintenance of infrastructure from a social scientific standpoint
Personal and Key Skills	6. Communicate effectively in written and oral form 7. Conduct research on a topic and organize findings in written form in a compelling manner

Module Content

Syllabus Plan

Whilst the module’s precise content may vary from year to year, it is envisaged that the syllabus will cover some or all of the following topics:

Roads

Water

Power/energy

Public health

Security

Algorithms

Borders

Learning and Teaching

This table provides an overview of how your hours of study for this module are allocated:

Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities	Guided independent study	Placement / study abroad
22	128	0

...and this table provides a more detailed breakdown of the hours allocated to various study activities:

Category	Hours of study time	Description
Schedule Learning and Teaching Activity	22	Weekly 2-hour lectures/seminars or 1 hour lecture + 1 hour seminar.
Guided Independent Study	40	Weekly reading for seminars
Guided Independent Study	60	Essay writing and research
Guided Independent Study	28	Case study preparation and writing

Online Resources

This module has online resources available via ELE (the Exeter Learning Environment).

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox. Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Cornell University Press, 2015.

Jason de Leon. Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. University of California Press, 2015.

Susan Leigh Star. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”. American Behavioural Scientist, 1999.

Huub Dijstelbloem. Borders as Infrastructure. MIT Press, 2021.

Dennis Rodgers, Bruce O'Neill. “Infrastructural Violence”. Ethnography, 2012.