The Chip Chronicles: Tracing Silicon Chips Through the Global Environment

This project follows a single silicon chip from its origins as sand and metallic elements to its installation and use in computer systems. It focuses specifically on the laborers and the practices and structures that govern them at the moments of material extraction and processing, production and assemblage, transportation, and purchase. In considering these laborers and associated discursive structures, I seek to expose the power relations and forces of legitimization, and how they manifest in new media economies.

 

Critical Infrastructures of Digital Culture

Foregrounded by my dissertation as well as current publications, this project is constituted through re-evaluating the basic organizational, material, and ideological structures and spaces required for societal operation through the lens of digital media culture. This project is driven by questions of how and why digital media affect cultural processes and knowledge legitimization, circulation, and consumption. The project’s projected outcome is an innovative theory and methodology for communication studies that sees material practice and theory as co-constitutive.