Infrastructures of Experience

Catalog description

What is experience? What is an experience? This class explores the forces, institutional apparatuses, and material substrates that organize how we feel, sense, perceive, know, and interpret reality, both individually and collectively. This class will show how phenomena as seemingly diverse as a chatbot interface, narrative genre, transit network, air-conditioned shopping mall, and escape room can all be understood as infrastructures of experience. It will introduce students to a critical interdisciplinary toolkit that they will apply to case studies selected by the instructor and to their own environments, culminating in an original mini-research project. Students will need access to a device with a screen and a camera (i.e., a laptop, smartphone, or tablet) to complete the assignments and other required class activities.