300651 Infrastructure, Development, and Futures in China (MA: Soziologie und Anthropologie der globalen Welt) (S) (WiSe 2026/2027)

This course examines infrastructure, development, and futures as interconnected dimensions of social transformation in China. We begin by considering historically changing ideas of development, modernisation, and the future in China, providing a basis for understanding the promises and expectations attached to contemporary projects of transformation. Drawing on anthropological and sociological approaches, the course understands infrastructure broadly as the material networks and systems that enable circulation, connection, and exchange while also shaping social relations, political possibilities, and everyday life. Through ethnographic and other social-scientific studies, we explore how infrastructures are planned, built, maintained, experienced, and contested across different settings in China. Particular attention is paid to the diverse futures that infrastructural and developmental projects seek to bring about, the actors involved in imagining and pursuing these futures, and the ways in which competing visions of prosperity, modernity, security, mobility, and the good life become materialised in particular places. The course thereby approaches infrastructure not simply as a technical or economic object, but as a social and political process through which development is negotiated and multiple possible futures are made, contested, and sometimes constrained.