Smart cities surveil through ubiquitous and intrusive data collection via networked sensors. Smart city efforts are also frequently imagined as primarily top-down and male visions of the future in service of economic benefit. The smart campus presents a new dimension of smart city urbanism as an identified gap in literature. In the following dissertation, I trace sociotechnical imaginaries of a large R1 research university as a smart campus, using an Internet of Things (IoT) pole deployment as a case study. My primary research questions consider the localized co-production and imagining of the smart campus and its implications, explored through four research approaches: (1) interviews with designers, (2) archival review (3) qualitative analysis of visual case study artifacts, and (4) student interviews supported with observational study. Key findings include parallels to existing research on smart city imaginaries based in technosolutionistic, male-dominated, science fiction visions of the future. There is a reproduction of Big Data narratives of efficiency, and top-down implementation of visions extended to the smart campus. I also identify tensions in narratives of purpose, between privacy and surveillance, and digital citizenship dynamics. I employ an intersectional feminist technoscience lens rooted in Science and Technology Studies (STS), as well as notions of data justice and data power, from Critical Data Studies (CDS), and narrative inquiry methods to examine the stabilization and legitimization of these smart campus narratives. I also incorporate analysis of gender, power, and racialized surveillance relevant to carceral imaginaries in the smart campus. With support from narrative inquiry methods, I explore rhetoric underpinning the smart campus imaginary, specifically around promises of democracy, egalitarianism, and techno-utopias, tracing influences in national geopolitics, science fiction, and Silicon Valley ideology. This work contributes to existing knowledge on sociotechnical imaginaries of the smart city, documenting a genealogy as it is embedded into the urban space of the smart campus, and presenting an empirically grounded study of smart cities. This work also contributes to understandings of data as power, data assemblages, and data narratives, and to feminist technoscience literature on smart cities and the smart campus in the fields of CDS and STS.

This interpretive dissertation study sought to understand what happened when a seventh-grade teacher introduced multimodal concepts and texts into his English Language Arts classroom. Multimodal texts contain linguistic features (words and sentences) but also images and graphic design features. The classroom teacher described himself as a novice with regards to multimodal literacies instruction and had previously focused predominantly on written or spoken texts. Motivating his decision to design and enact a multimodal literacies pedagogy was his belief that students needed to garner experience interpreting and composing the kinds of texts that populated his students’ social worlds. Therefore, I asked: What happened when multimodal narratives were used as mentor texts in a seventh-grade English Language Arts classroom? Drawing from ethnographic and case study methods, I observed and gathered data regarding how the teacher and his students enacted and experienced an eight-week curriculum unit centered on multimodal concepts and multimodal texts. My findings describe the classroom teacher’s design decisions, the messiness that occurred as the classroom was (re)made into a classroom community that valued modes beyond written and spoken language, and the students’ experiences of the curriculum as classroom work, lifework, play, and drudgery. Based on my findings, I developed six assertions: (1) when designing and enacting multimodal literacies curriculum for the first time, exposing students to a wide range of multimodal texts took precedence; (2) adapted and new multimodal literacy practices began to emerge, becoming valued practices over time; (3) literacy events occurred without being grounded in literacy practices; (4) in a classroom dedicated to writing, modes of representation and communication and their associated tools and materials provided students with resources for use in their own writing/making; (5) the roles of the teacher and his students underwent change as modal expertise became sourced from across the classroom community; and (6) students experienced the multimodal literacies curriculum as play, classroom work, lifework, and drudgery. The dissertation study concludes with implications for teachers and researchers looking to converge multimodality theory with pedagogical practices and maps future research possibilities.