User:Kels.bran/Infrastructure Studies

Infrastructure studies
Infrastructure studies is an emerging interdisciplinary research area in the humanities and sciences that examines the political networks and cultures that develop from critical infrastructures (e.g. railways, water pipes, fiber optic cables). . Infrastructure studies draws network theories and methods from organizational studies, media studies, and science studies.

Present day infrastructure studies students looks at the global and local impact of e-infrastructure, also known as cyberinfrastructurewhich is the term used for technology and agencies that conduct research through distributed regional, national, and global collaborations enabled by the internet.

Methods
Students in infrastructure studies uses both qualitative (e.g. ethnography) and quantitative research (e.g. Social Network Anaylsis to analyze the way in which infrastructure effect the way humans interact in everyday life. For example, The Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ) uses the grounded-theory approach, which creates theoretical frameworks for organizing infrastructure based on data points, to research nonprofit and philanthropic infrastructure in early 2008.

University Affiliations
Infrastructures studies is taught at Georgetown University in the graduate department of Communication, Culture, and Technology (CCT). Here is a link to a past Syllabus A similar undergraduate course is also taught Morgan University at the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. School of Engineering, called, "Transportation & Urban infrastructure Studies."

Articles and Contributors
Edwards, Paul N.; Bowker, Geoffrey C.; Jackson, Steven J.; and Williams, Robin (2009) "Introduction: An Agenda for Infrastructure Studies," Journal of the Association for Information Systems: Vol. 10: Iss. 5, Article 6.

Hughes, Thomas. "The Evolution of Large Technological Systems," in The Social Construction of Technological Systems, eds. Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 51-82

Parks, Lisa, "Around the Antenna Tree: The Politics of Infrastructural Visibility," Flow Journal March 6th, 2009 View

Svensson, Patrick. "From Optical Fiber to Conceptual Cyberinfrastructure," Digital Humanities Quarterly 5.1:2011. View

References