Professor Cori Hayden will be teaching a graduate seminar this fall in Department of Anthropology-Anthro 250X. The seminars will be held on Fridays 2pm-4pm. Possible themes include: From the worrying crowd to the wise crowd; The crowd as economic and market force; The cloud’s materiality; Data, big and small; Cloud as war; and Political atmospheres (climate, the politics of air, citizen science).

‘Cloud’ and ‘crowd’ have recently come to animate a range of techno-utopian possibilities and platforms for social and economic life. We might think of the ubiquity (in some places) of cloud computing and the allure of crowdsourcing, or the social media–inflected crowds that seemed, if briefly, to represent new hopes for contemporary mass politics (the Arab Spring, Occupy). In these and many other iterations, crowd and cloud have come to name and produce new kinds of collectives; to animate visions of markets, value, and creative labor (“the wisdom of the crowd,” data-mining); to suggest new compositional possibilities for art, environment, and political activism; and to underpin transformations in forms and aesthetics of knowledge production itself (eg, the figure of [Big] Data).

With such provocations in view, this graduate seminar in Anthropology interrogates some of the histories, contemporary forms, and conceptual and political implications of cloud and crowd. We do so in part to understand and read against the grain of the celebratory tenor of much current work on these themes. Course material will range widely — this is an exploratory venture– with the goal of thinking critically and historically about, for example, how crowd and cloud mobilize senses of political possibility as well as forms of surveillance and control; how they provide the warrant for new and also familiar articulations of political economy and the distribution of labor; or how they are called upon to embody the promises of capitalist democracy and hence how they produce certain visions of “the state.” How, in other words, do we think about political atmospheres of cloud and crowd in the current moment, and what are their historical entailments?

Readings will draw from recent collections (Kelty and Irani’s 2012 Crowds and Clouds; Schnapp and Tiews’ 2006 Crowds); classic works (LeBon’s The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind, Tarde’s The Laws of Imitation, and Canetti’s Crowds and Power), and a range of contemporary theoretical and empirically grounded work in feminist and social theory, history, anthropology, media and new media studies, and science and technology studies.