Infrastructure is all around us, rarely remarked upon. Indeed, the latent state of
infrastructure is part of what marks it as such; as Susan Leigh Starr has noted,
infrastructure studies involves the examination of “boring things.”

This class will explore the emerging nexus of critical infrastructure studies and
critical university studies, focusing on the infrastructure of scholarly knowledge.
From our libraries to our journals to our conferences to our operating systems
to our use of social media, scholars communicate through an entanglement of
corporate and commercial interests. Beyond the obviously problematic commercial
infrastructures built by predatory publishers and corporate conglomerates
such as Elsevier, scholars routinely depend on for-profit publication venues and
commercial journals to disseminate their work.

As a set of alternatives to the commercialized infrastructure of knowledge
dissemination in the academy, the course will consider open access publication
models, free software development, and university press publishing. Even as
we explore such alternatives, we will critique them, considering the ways that
such alternatives themselves depend upon commercial technical stacks, and
considering whether these alternatives are equally available and accessible across
the globe.

Topics to be explored include: introductions to critical infrastructure studies
and critical university studies; the environmental impact of the cloud; the free
software movement; academic publishing models; constructing open platforms.
Students in the class will explore publishing platforms collaboratively created
by CUNY and other partners, including the CUNY Academic Commons and
Manifold, as well as others such as Humanities Commons and Zotero. The goal
of the class, in the end, is to ask students to consider how and where their own
scholarly knowledge is distributed, and by whom and under what terms.