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Accepted Paper
Paper short abstract
“Silicon Saxony” is Europe’s largest chip cluster, promising regional renewal and European digital sovereignty. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the North of Dresden, our contribution details how the geopolitical infrastructures of semiconductor production come to bear in local settings.
Paper long abstract
On the outskirts of the German city Dresden lies one of the largest chip production clusters in Europe: “Silicon Saxony” encompasses a network of semiconductor fabs, research facilities and suppliers that promise not only a high-tech future for a region marred by post-socialist de-industrialization, political discontent and the rise of the far-right. It is also supposed to guarantee Europe’s “digital sovereignty”, safeguarding the production of semiconductors from US-China rivalry and supply chain disruptions. The cluster constitutes an “operative space” in a shifting architecture of geopolitical power (Mezzadra and Neilson 2024). Its current expansion demands large political, financial and infrastructural interventions: laying powerlines through private backyards, routing sewage pipes through a nature reserve, building houses for migrant workers and dispersing large sums of state subsidies.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the North of Dresden, our contribution details how the geopolitical infrastructures of semiconductor production come to bear in local settings. It reflects on the absence of visible protest and surveys the multiplicity of discourses on the cluster, ranging from the need for a new community swimming pool to the stakes of a new cold war fought by means of microchips. It recounts conflicting imaginaries, histories and futures – from the semiconductor industry in the former GDR to the promise of a “Silicon Saxony”. The questions that emerge concern the place of geopolitics in quotidian lives, sense-making and political struggles – how and where can the geopolitics of infrastructural projects be studied, when they appear to elude the scales of everyday life?
The Everyday Geopolitics of Infrastructure
Session 2