Surfacing Usually Imperceptible Infrastructures
Cotten Seiler at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, in Durham, North Carolina, where he's serving as a Resident Associate.
Office Hours: Professor of American Studies Cotten Seiler
by Tony Moore
Professor of American Studies Cotten Seiler received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. A frequent media commentator, he is the author of the books Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago, 2008) and White Care: The Impact of Race on American Infrastructure (Chicago, 2026). He is also the editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies.
Your work sits at the bustling intersection of cultural history, race, political theory and something called “infrastructure humanities,” which is not a phrase most people encounter every day. What is it about Dickinson that enables that kind of wide-ranging, boundary-crossing scholarship, and what does the college offer students who want to think about American life through these unconventional lenses?
That bustling intersection certainly wasn’t on the map when I arrived at Dickinson. Kind of like in that Christopher Nolan movie Inception, a bunch of us had to dream it into existence. I guess what took me there was a bedrock belief that no single discipline can alone supply the tools we need to understand people and the things they do. Producing that knowledge, and sharing it with our students and the wider world, is ultimately what we as professors are after. I’ve found that interdisciplinary inquiry—where you sort of rotate a problem or topic to different angles and examine it through different frames and methods—makes for the most compelling and generative accounts of things. I think a lot of Dickinson students, and especially those who find their way to American studies, have a similar cast of mind and an inclination to dream new ground.
When most people hear “infrastructure,” they think hard hats and highway bills, not humanistic inquiry. But infrastructure humanities is a real and growing field, and your work is at the forefront of it. What does the humanities bring to the study of infrastructure that engineering reports and policy papers miss—and why does that matter right now?
Infrastructure humanities coalesced during the heap of years it took me to write this new book. My first book, Republic of Drivers—which looked at the rise of our car-centric built environment—was prototypical of the approach and questions that came to characterize the field: How, why, when and for whom is a particular infrastructure built? Answering these questions requires more than just knowing how much they cost and the engineering and politicking behind them. That stuff is important, but infrastructure humanities scholars are more interested in how the amount, quality and condition of public infrastructures—highways, dams, power grids, schools, water-treatment facilities, parks, pools, etc.—express the political philosophies and values of a particular place, time and group of people. If there’s enough of it and it’s working properly, infrastructure is supposed to be invisible; the truism is that we’re only conscious of it when it fails.
Humanities research renders visible not only the usually imperceptible infrastructures themselves but the cultural forces and dynamics beneath them. Unearthing those is crucial to knowing ourselves and charting our future. If we think of public infrastructure provision in the United States as a measure of what the state thinks of the population—really, what we as Americans think of ourselves and each other—it matters tremendously.
The argument at the heart of your new book, White Care, is pretty devastating: American infrastructure is crumbling not because we can't afford to fix it but because, once its benefits had to be shared across racial lines, a critical mass of Americans decided they'd rather let it all fall apart. That's, well, awful. What was the moment or discovery that set you on the path to this book, the detail that made you say, "Oh, this is the story I need to tell"?
White Care arose out of elements of my research and teaching sort of knocking together and demanding that I put them in conversation: race and racialization in American life, eugenics, U.S. conservatism, evolutionary theory, feminist political philosophy, desegregation and the white backlash against it, immigration politics and the rise of market fundamentalism (or “neoliberalism”).
One of the moments you describe came when, early in my research, I discovered an explicit link between evolutionism and public playgrounds: early 1900s “play theorists” claimed that children must be guided in their play through all the phases of human evolution (hence “jungle gyms” and “monkey bars”). Playgrounds, these scientists recommended, should therefore be funded by the state, so children could reach their full potential as workers and citizens. That blew my mind, and it still does.
The narrative of the racially motivated neglect of public infrastructures over the last half-century will likely be many audiences’ main takeaway from the book. But White Care also recounts the earlier story of how the different “white races”—considered for decades to be biologically different from one another and of better and worse quality—came by the mid-twentieth century to see one another as “Caucasian.” This recognition enabled the government—breaking with a tradition of stinginess in American political culture—to fund and build a robust surround of infrastructures that not only radically improved citizens’ health and life chances but also conferred prestige and fortune on the nation. That that investment was predicated on those citizens’ whiteness shouldn’t overshadow the fact that the era’s social and natural sciences, law and popular culture fostered a remarkably productive solidarity. How we might craft such solidarity under new demographic conditions is a pressing question for our troubled republic. I can’t think of a political project more deserving of our imagination and energies.
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Published March 13, 2026