February 26

11:30am-1pm

Sage 5711

STS invites you to join Veronica Aguila’s colloquium. Unlike software designers, Internet of Things designers must negotiate global supply chains to realize their visions. By bringing a case study from open hardware design in Mexico, Dr. Aguila shows how technology trade policies—and trade policy in general—have shaped and will continue to shape computing designs and design practices (hardware, firmware, and software). 

Dr. Aguila draws on archival research and two and half years of ethnography in the Mexican Bajio, North America’s largest industrial corridor and an important site of global computing supply chains. At this site, new trade agreements offer small tech entrepreneurs, some of them open hardware developers and IoT designers, an opportunity to reorganize the distribution of current and future benefits, risks, and rights attached to private and State-supported technological projects. Dr. Aguila shows how technology designers realize their devices at the intersection of trade policies, global supply chain volatilities, and the digital world's materialities.

Bio:
Verónica Uribe del Aguila is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication and the Science Studies Program at the University of California- San Diego. Previously, she completed an MA in Design Studies at Parsons, the School of Design. Uribe has a longstanding practice of using critical methods to examine how actors experience technology differently along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and geographical location. In her research, she draws together critical design studies, feminist science and technology studies (STS), and political economy to examine technology as a site of political participation. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation.