This course explores the relationship between the political and the technical, with a particular focus on recent work on infrastructure and expertise in the humanities and social sciences. From railroads to communication networks, water pipes and electricity wires, infrastructures and technology have been central to mediating modernity. Rather than neutral means towards more substantive ends, this course approaches infrastructures as networked systems that both shape and are shaped by social life and as such, can open up a broader set of questions in relation to classical questions of political theory, from democracy and citizenship to protest and disagreement. Specifically, we’ll be interested in how infrastructures and technical devices become central to the constitution of political terrains in a context in which the formal political sphere is often de facto inaccessible to many. The course begins by examining the historical relationship between infrastructure, technology and power via studies of colonial infrastructures, Cold War technopolitics and the centrality of infrastructure and technology in projects of development and modernization. We will then explore contemporary instances of technopolitics, from climate change expertise and the protests surrounding extractive infrastructures to the technopolitical questions laid bare by COVID-19. Readings will focus on theory that has influenced the “infrastructural turn” and draw on science and technology studies, anthropology, political theory and geography. This course requires permission from the instructor to register.