Pipelines have been described as “invasive infrastructures” by indigenous activists. They have been conceived of as “vital infrastructures” by governments and been subject to special emergency policies and provisions. They have been subject to sabotage, as in the dramatic damage inflicted on a gas pipeline in the war in Ukraine, or through less visible “rogue” pipelines used to poach oil from many places around the world. They can bring into view and animate wider geopolitical relations, whether North Stream gas pipelines connecting Russia and Germany, or their centrality to imperial projects in the Middle East. They have also produced new forms of politics and political subjects from the “water protectors” of the NoDAPL mobilization, to the call to “blow up” a pipeline (Malm) or in the long lasting conflict in the Niger Delta. Once built, they carry with them the legacies of particular techno-political histories that often remain intransigent even as the political contexts that brought them into being shift. They also are subject to breakage and corrosion, spilling what they are supposed to carry, often to the detriment of the health of the surrounding area. This course will take pipelines – infrastructures that carry mostly oil and natural gas – as material structures whose investigation can illuminate larger questions about the shape of contemporary climate activism, environmental justice, relations of sovereignty, citizenship and indigeneity, and the (geo-)politics of energy writ large. We will explore how pipelines can draw geographies together, in the process often producing new publics (Dewey) and new modalities of protest, political subjectivities and tactics. This course will draw on science and technology studies, environmental humanities, political ecology, political theory, and the anthropology of energy. It will bring together literatures from the new materialism, to the infrastructural turn in the humanities and social sciences as well as post- and decolonial theories.