Short Abstract

Semiconductors have morphed from obscure to cherished technology, shaped by technology hype and climate change hope. Yet the powers running through chip relations remain understudied. How can STS engage with semiconductor infrastructures and ecologies without reproducing corporate hype and harm?

Description

Silicon lives depend on semiconductor industries that grow, stagnate, and wane (Burrell 2020). Over the past century, high-tech computation has shaped economic, social, ecological, and political life. Semiconductors have morphed from obscure technology to pivotal social nodes. New attention to Silicon stems both from the strategic role semiconductors play in “leading” technological domains (e.g, digital transformation, energy transition) and from a geopolitical anxiety of falling behind (Miller 2022). Moving across the planet, chip production reconfigures relations between center/periphery, urban/rural, as well as past/future (Cooper 2021, Crawford 2021).

Yet the powers running through chip relations remain insufficiently examined: how they touch bodies, land, and elements; how they shape housing, energy, and forms of extraction. Semiconductor industries, the mere promise of their arrival, redirect water, pollute rivers, mobilise public funds, employ people, and discard them again (Little 2014; Lepawsky 2022; Pasek et al. 2023; Riofrancos 2025). How can STS methodologies engage with infrastructures and ecologies generated by high-tech chip worlds (Chen 2015; Rella 2023)—without reproducing corporate hype or harm (TITiPI 2024)? What futures are imagined to drive change; what makes silicon lives viable and resilient?

This panel invites exploratory, critical, and imaginative contributions that turn the infrastructures and ecologies of semiconductors on their head. We suggest querying:

- Industrial transformations, temporalities and closures: Case studies of high-tech industries being reconfigured, wound down, or relocated. How do infrastructures and livelihoods shift?

- Global conduits and informal circuits: Analyses of value chains, directionalities and hierarchies in, e.g., monopolies, assetization, shadow markets. How do industry notions such as “backend” and “frontend” perform the field?

- Re-wiring silicon worlds: Tracing how gender, race, caste and class are wired into semiconductor infrastructures. What other ways of doing live-able high-tech futures exist?

- Planetary perspectives on extraction: Connecting micro-scale chip production to planetary transformations. How to follow materials from mine to the data centre; and what remains–inextractable, irredeemable?

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