[Air-L] CFP - 4S Open Panel #227: Computing Machinery Supply Chains Across Space, Time, and Method

[MC Forelle]

 Hello AOIR Community!

It's been so exciting to see the fascinating open panels that folks are
putting together. I wanted to share one more, for those of you interested
in talking about computing machinery supply chains. Verónica and I
especially eager to discuss methodological challenges or provide a space to
workshop works in progress!

*Panel 227 Computing Machinery Supply Chains Across Space, Time, and Method*
*MC Forelle, University of Virginia; Ver**ónica Uribe del Aguila,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute*

Over the past decade, the computing machinery industry—the sectors involved
in designing, developing, manufacturing, and distributing physical hardware
from industrial controllers to advanced AI processors—has faced several
controversies. These have brought public attention to the environmental and
economic impacts of their supply chains understood as extraction sites,
factories, and trade agreements the industry depends on. The ripple effects
of the chip shortage during the COVID pandemic, the US and EU’s Chip Act,
and the rising tensions between China and Taiwan are examples of the
computing machinery industry's infrastructural power, or the power to tear
apart people’s lives while remaining invisible.

STS scholars have long taken an interest in the global supply chains that
comprise the computing machinery industry. They have paid attention to
their materiality, geopolitical dynamics, and sociotechnical imaginaries to
unpack how the industry's transnational configurations perpetuate troubling
racial, colonial, neoliberal, and capitalist logic across different
industries such as automotive, aerospace, agriculture and computing
Itself.

Building on this foundation, we invite submissions inquiring how computing
machinery supply chains influence, expose, or otherwise involve other
sectors of global industry through the lenses of political economy,
critical geography and new materialism. We are particularly interested in
historical and ethnographic perspectives that help us grasp the role
computing technology plays in shaping the organization of industrial supply
chains in different sectors.

We will organize these sessions as a combined format panel. Therefore, we
invite both full papers and works-in-progress. Full papers will be
assembled into a traditional paper presentation session. Works-in-progress
will be arranged into a workshop session for participants to share
conceptual and/or methodological approaches and challenges and to
collaboratively generate new avenues, techniques, and solutions. We ask
that WIP submissions provide a clear description of the project in
progress, its level of completion, and two or three questions for the
session.
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