{"pk":42195,"title":"Infrastructure Fieldnotes: Engaging the City through Reading, Research, and Representations","subtitle":null,"abstract":"As part of a recent undergraduate seminar on infrastructure, students completed weekly exercises dubbed “infrastructure fieldnotes.” Going beyond conventional discussion board posts or reading responses, exercise prompts incorporated reading analysis, methods practice, writing prompts, and experiments in multimodal representation as students engaged with urban planning and quotidian experiences of infrastructure and made sense of the infrastructures that enable and structure city life. In this research article, the instructor for the course offers a preliminary presentation of the assignment’s structure and pedagogical objectives, followed by an analysis of how some prompts influenced classroom discussions by creating common points of reference and revealing different experiences of the campus and city. This discussion is followed by five student contributions on different aspects of the assignment. Some take up specific prompts to demonstrate how they created openings for engagement with course material, some reflect on how exercises enabled students to cultivate new kinds of awareness or attention to infrastructure, and others extend the fieldnotes project beyond the class to show what kinds of analysis endured after the course ended. Altogether, these student analyses demonstrate and reflect on the utility of sustained, open-ended prompts for student engagement with course material and concepts in an urban campus.","language":"en","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial  4.0","short_name":"CC BY-NC 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\n\nNonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.\n\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0"},"keywords":[{"word":"writing prompts"},{"word":"participant observation"},{"word":"Infrastructure"},{"word":"Urban Anthropology"}],"section":"Articles","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8h10g5m7","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Scott","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ross","name_suffix":"","institution":"Washington University in St. Louis","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Alexandra","middle_name":"","last_name":"Groth","name_suffix":"","institution":"","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Swasti","middle_name":"","last_name":"Shah","name_suffix":"","institution":"","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Anissa","middle_name":"","last_name":"Sterner","name_suffix":"","institution":"","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Abigail","middle_name":"","last_name":"Francis","name_suffix":"","institution":"","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Denali","middle_name":"","last_name":"Graham","name_suffix":"","institution":"","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2023-09-02T04:27:10Z","date_accepted":"2023-09-02T04:27:10Z","date_published":"2024-07-31T07:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/teachinglearninganthro/article/42195/galley/31505/download/"}]}