Embracing Hybrid Infrastructures

Material, Discursive, and Rhetorical Infrastructures

Infrastructures are relational, ecological, epistemic, mundane, and never neutral (Star, “Ethnography of Infrastructure”; Star and Ruhleder, “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure”). Infrastructures are most commonly considered in their material manifestations, primarily associated with near-invisible arrangements of roads, bridges, telephone lines, or fiber optic cables that are most readily visible when they break down (Star, “Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 380). Within a humanities education framework, material needs of particular programs range from appropriate technologies enabling interpersonal connections (such as email), synchronous meetings (such as video calling technologies), collaborative learning platforms (such as educational technology tools or social learning platforms), and even particular classroom setups and arrangements. Infrastructures facilitating the material, financial, and connectivity needs of evolving humanities graduate programs are typically what publics most readily identify with the term infrastructure. We suggest, however, that humanities programs look beyond purely material infrastructures and envision infrastructures along other, equally important axes.

A successful infrastructure for humanities education must extend beyond the material to encompass discursive and rhetorical dimensions (Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice). Infrastructure, as Bowker and Star posit in Sorting Things Out, can refer to a set of practices that we live through, without necessarily understanding who built or controls those practices (319). Similarly, Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill describe infrastructure as the “taken-for-granted, often invisible, institutional structure” that is implicit for most stakeholders in an organization, including the policies and practices in place (“Infrastructure and Composing,” 19). These definitions of the term align with what Read and Frith call discursive infrastructures (Read, “Infrastructural Function”; Frith, “Technical Standards”).

Discursive infrastructures are characterized by documents such as organizational plans, procedures, technical standards, and design schemes. Read argues that particular forms of writing function as infrastructures, helping to enable and shape collective actions, focusing on how broad, inclusive definitions of infrastructure can facilitate relationships and alliance brokering (“Infrastructural Function,” 14). Discursive infrastructures help condition the human experience, especially as boundaries between virtual and physical space grow more and more porous when interacting alongside emerging technologies (Dourish and Bell, “Infrastructure of Experience”).

The discursive infrastructures that support, enable, and shape graduate humanities programs—the program handbooks, plans of study, course descriptions, thesis and dissertation requirements, mentoring routines, extracurricular organizations, email lists, social media groups, and awards and honors—work to organize human action, shape collective practices, standardize operations and activities, and provide an architecture for cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship formation. Assembling a successful humanities graduate program is about far more than collecting material infrastructures and coordinating their use with discursive infrastructures, however. Humanities graduate programs, we argue, benefit on a deeper level from consideration of rhetorical infrastructures.

Rhetorical Infrastructures and Graduate Humanities Education

Rhetorical infrastructures refer to a somewhat abstract, but impactful, assembly of collective sensibilities, values, habits, attitudes, conventions, aptitudes, pedagogies, and attunements that are honed through shared practice across a program’s networks. Rhetorical infrastructures leverage the human within the infrastructural system and provide understated pathways for organizations to coalesce, evolve, conflict, transform, adapt, and persist in unified bonds and alliances. A rhetorical infrastructure might be a common warm-up or wrap-up discussion strategy shared across the curriculum, a program-wide commitment to practicing collaboration on research and publications, or even an expectation that students further along in the program mentor and assist newer students. We assert that consideration of material, discursive, and rhetorical infrastructures constitutes a hybrid infrastructure that considers the intersections of humans, technologies, practices, procedures, standards, sensibilities, and material constraints to more holistically orient collective practices at an organization-wide level. If graduate humanities programs focus narrowly on only singular elements of their infrastructures, they risk neglecting attention to the potentially generative intersections of those already hybrid infrastructures.

Material infrastructures, such as particular interconnected technological setups, help nurture, condition, and cultivate rhetorical sensibilities that, over time and repetition, grow into sustained infrastructures that programmatic stakeholders draw on and leverage. As emerging digital technologies become more embedded as fundamental components of evolving and innovating humanities graduate programs, the rhetorical sensibilities accompanying them become more worthy of attention and more important to foreground, and they become easier to ignore. Technologies, or material infrastructures, need not be present, in active use, or even plugged in, to enact deep-rooted and ingrained influence on collective habits, orientations, and behaviors (Boyle et al., “Digital”). We argue that technologies and infrastructures themselves are far less compelling and integral for emerging humanities graduate programs to consider compared to the practices, sensibilities, orientations, affects, and modes of being that those technologies cultivate.

For instance, the Covid-19 pandemic forced many in higher education to adopt emerging technologies such as the popular video calling platform Zoom into their everyday practice (Supiano “Why Is Zoom So Exhausting?”; Hogan and Sathy, “8 Ways to Be More Inclusive”; Flaherty, “Synchronous Instruction”). Many students and instructors have commented on how simple adoption of the novel technology did not provide the educational results they were hoping for (Pulsipher, “Beyond Zoom U”). In at least some cases, the successful adoption of the material infrastructure of the Zoom platform may not have been matched by the successful cultivation of rhetorical infrastructures necessary to make the educational experience over the video call an entirely positive one for students. Platforms such as Zoom are material infrastructures, but they induce rhetorical sensibilities in the collective dynamic developed among their users. As more students and program stakeholders express dissatisfaction with the so-called Zoom University, it may help to consider the rhetorical infrastructures in place surrounding those emerging technologies (Lorenz et al., “We Live in Zoom Now”).

Adoption of a material infrastructure such as Zoom benefits from the conscious, active development of a rhetorical infrastructure as well. For instance, rather than simply running a lecture through the video calling platform, an instructor might split the class into small breakout rooms using an affordance of the video technology to nurture smaller, more active group dynamics among the classroom population. Additionally, the course instructor might provide active, deliberate guidance on what small breakout group discussions could or should be characterized by, including guidance on the content of the small group conversation but also the tone, the procedure, the available technological affordances, and the discussion’s end goal. The instructor might even provide tips to “break the ice” in a small breakout group session and provide discussion guidelines to nurture sensibilities toward, say, collaboration and creativity. Realizing that many students are unfamiliar with not only the video calling technology but also with the format, organization, configuration, and schemes of the course, the instructor might benefit from foregrounding rhetorical infrastructures—collective sensibilities, habits, and orientations formed through practice—as valuable resources for the course or program to mobilize in generative, fruitful ways.

Possible Futures: Embracing Hybrid Infrastructures in Digital Graduate Education

To outline the value of embracing hybrid infrastructures for digital graduate education in the twenty-first century, we offer three orienting principles that can be used programmatically and pedagogically to more strategically build interactions with technological, hybrid infrastructures.

First, when negotiating the infrastructural structures, values, and priorities of future graduate humanities programs, remembering the human as an orienting principle offers a flexible but robust heuristic that helps foreground the ethical, equitable, and socially just implications of cultural-technological infrastructures. Infrastructures—material, discursive, and rhetorical—are only as useful in graduate education as their human stakeholders deem them to be. Additionally, remembering the human can help program administrators and stakeholders conceptualize how their infrastructures serve particular groups of people, including orienting attention to concerns of social injustice, inclusivity, and equity. Graduate humanities programs should consider what their infrastructures do to reinforce existing power structures, privilege some viewpoints over others, and enable particular cultural practices and undermine others. These sensibilities, built up over time, practice, and repetition, evolve into important rhetorical infrastructures that program members cultivate through practice and then codify, communicate, and leverage for later guidance.

Second, an orienting value of holistic attention to infrastructures offers graduate humanities programs the opportunity to gauge the interplay between the material, discursive, and rhetorical infrastructures in which their programs engage. A graduate program giving holistic attention to infrastructures might involve active reflection on how infrastructures in use help shape program culture, how those infrastructures serve students and other stakeholders, and what could be done differently to better orient program practice toward core program values. On a practical level, this might involve active reflection and self-assessment, leading to the addition of additional technological infrastructure such as Otter.ai add-ons to automatically add captions to Zoom calls, which moves program practice closer to program values such as inclusivity. Holistic attention to infrastructures, after a process of self-assessment and self-interrogation on the part of the program, allows the program to calibrate informed responses and adaptions if desired outcomes are not being adequately worked toward. Considering infrastructure not as equipment for everyday use and functioning but as collective practice and as collective capacities and aptitudes allows programs to ensure flexibility, hybridity, and resilience are not merely buzzwords but practiced actions of benefit to involved students, instructors, and administrators.

Lastly, active consideration of documenting rhetorical infrastructures in the context of graduate humanities programs helps ensure that rhetorical infrastructures are not fleeting, temporary additions to a humanities graduate program, but that they can be replicated, sustained, and benefited from in a variety of forms. Documenting rhetorical infrastructures, which might take the form of codified, formalized practices outlined in document form for program-wide adherence and observance, can convey important values, sensibilities, and principles to the diverse array of individuals forming a program. Most graduate programs utilize a centralized, formalized program handbook or guide for students and administrators to reference, which already serves implicitly to orient values, principles, and standards on a program-wide basis. A “values and goals” statement calibrated toward infrastructures can go a long way toward conveying to students, instructors, and administrators what programs value about how their infrastructures are used for discussion, collaboration, research production, and teaching, especially when these practices are undertaken in novel forms using emerging technologies. Graduate programs documenting rhetorical infrastructures can generate strategy documents for effectively engaging technology, more deliberately engaging intentional discussion strategies, systemically connecting disparate elements of the program, and building collaboration opportunities across programmatic structures in an intentional, active process. They might assemble a program repository as discursive infrastructure for stakeholders with collaborative, comprehensive exam advice, best practices for program teaching in the program, or recommendations from program alums on professionalism and post-PhD life. Documenting rhetorical infrastructures can help communicate valued knowledge to new students and instructors and orient the guiding principles for research, teaching, and collaboration as programs transition to increasingly hybrid futures.

Putting digital tools in the hands of humanities programs rarely translates to pedagogical success on its own but benefits greatly from further consideration of the cultures, practices, and learning environments enabled by those technologies (Losh, War on Learning). We argue that the humanities of the digital future would do well to focus on the practices, sensibilities, orientations, and attunements formed between students, communication forms, and technological structures that are enabled by digital technologies, rather than focusing primarily on the technologies themselves. In embracing hybrid infrastructures, graduate humanities programs can begin to conceptualize technological infrastructures based on the practices and sensibilities they nurture, in addition to the affordances they might provide.

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