Please use the readings. In addition to reflecting on course terms, this assignment is designed to give you opportunity to reflect upon: 1. The processes and relations that situate you within an infrastructural system of your choosing. 2. In so doing, setting up a question and substantiating an argument (in other words, a thesis) linked to the terms of our class readings and discussions of the previous few weeks concerning infrastructure as “modern” sociotechnical systems. Here we might note Paul N. Edwards suggestions that: • “To be modern is to live within and by means of infrastructures.” • Infrastructures constitute “connective tissues and circulatory systems of modernity.” • It is important to understand infrastructures not as simply material hardware, but rather as larger “sociotechnical” systems. Prompt: 1. Choose one arena or example of infrastructure to which you are linked and that interests you. 2. From our readings thus far in class (Parks/Starosielski, Edwards, Larkin), please choose three terms/ideas that help you to explicate the processes and relationships through which you are linked to, embedded within, or positioned in relation to your chosen infrastructural system. 3. From here write an essay and substantiate an argument (you must have a central thesis statement) about the processes and relationships through which you are linked to your chosen infrastructural system. Please provide a “works cited” page at the end of your essay (this does not count as one of your 4 pages). Evaluation will be based on the clarity of your: • Question and thesis statement • Relevant explication of the terms that you have chosen from the readings. • Effectiveness of your close reading (in other words “thick description”) of the relevant details of your chosen infrastructural system and your relationship to it. • Your substantiation of an argument by way of the links you make between your chosen terms and details of your chosen infrastructural system.