Building a “smart” campus with care: Contradictions and communication in infrastructuring

Abstract

The concept of a “smart” campus is used broadly to describe initiatives to make all aspects of campus life easier, however, some salient features include ease of data collection and distribution, fast and reliable energy consumption measurement, minimizing excess energy consumption, physical security of the built environment, and cross-campus and remote communication and computing abilities. The questions that animated this dissertation project emerged from ongoing fieldwork that has evidenced a gap in our collective understanding of the ways in which different publics of a university campus specifically, and built environments generally, understand the goals of new technology introduction and implementation. This dissertation is based on the analysis of data gathered at a large research university. Studying a single university provided the opportunity to deeply integrate myself into a complex institution during a time of rapid sociotechnical, infrastructural, and organizational change. Practices of care are relational and responsive to technology and organizational changes. The shape this change takes is informed by power. Alignment around a shared definition of success was a heuristic for power in this process and illuminated opportunities for alignment and misalignment in the values driving various groups to engage with “smart” infrastructuring projects and the data extracted from them. In leveraging a feminist politics of care, this project eschews productivist logics and their too often exploitative and oppressive ends to instead highlight the power of a focus on care to encourage reciprocity and mutuality. This is an orientation to working within an institution that is inherently resistive and points us toward imagining systems that are regenerative and life-affirming.