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This paper follows the cleanroom suit to trace a central contradiction in computing: protecting purity for chips over workers. Using historical and material-semiotic methods, I trace the racialized, gendered hierarchies built into the garment and naturalized in Silicon Valley's aesthetic practices.

Paper long abstract

Scholars of digital culture have extensively documented the environmental and labor costs of chip production (Gabrys 2011, Nakamura 2014, Crawford 2021). The specific logics governing how bodies are valued–and devalued–within fabrication sites remain underexamined. This paper argues that the cleanroom suit (garments worn in semiconductor manufacturing) materializes a foundational contradiction at the heart of computing history: an obsessive commitment to purity for the chip that systematically disregards protections for the workers who make it. Drawing on historical and material-semiotic methods, I treat the suit as an "idea-in-form”– a material object that naturalizes particular hierarchies of bodily value. This hierarchy was built into the garment itself, designed to protect the chip, not the worker. Its design selectively contained human-sourced contamination while exposing cleanroom technicians to toxic, sometimes carcinogenic chemicals. Through archival and visual analysis of semiconductor trade literature, cleanroom operation manuals, activist materials, and Silicon Valley advertising campaigns from the 1970s through the 2000s, I examine how contamination control protocols positioned human bodies as the primary threat to microchip production–to be disciplined, contained, and ultimately displaced “offshore.” Throughout Silicon Valley's history this hierarchy was consistently enacted through racialized and gendered hiring practices that explicitly sourced "small, foreign, and female" workers (Hossfeld 1993). Intel's influential 1997 "Bunny People" campaign transformed the cleanroom suit's disciplinary function into a floating signifier of technological transcendence– available to some bodies, premised on the exploitation of others. The cleanroom suit thus reveals how semiconductor infrastructures produce fantasies of disembodiment for some, systematically exposing other bodies to harm.

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The paper draws on a research project assessing the water governance impact of Intel’s semiconductor production in Ireland. It is to present qualitative data collected over the first six months of the project on the many water infrastructures that altogether constitute Intel’s Irish water catchment.

Paper long abstract

In a context of climate change, risks arising from water scarcity are foreseen to grow dramatically. While Ireland may be seen as a well water-resourced country – the paradigmatic wet, green Island – Dublin, its largest city, is under increased water supply pressure. State-owned water utility Uisce Éireann argue that current water supply shortfalls are already putting at risk 1.7 million residents of the Greater Dublin Area. Access to water infrastructure itself is highly uneven with over 1000 households in the same Greater Dublin Area without piped running water (Plumbing Poverty Project). What is more, large-scale water infrastructure projects put forward to address these shortfalls are widely contested.

Against this backdrop, since the start of its operation in Ireland in 1989, Intel has been quietly shaping the country’s water infrastructure landscape. Located in Leixlip, west of Dublin, the semiconductor production facility has rapidly become the largest industrial water user in the country. In 2022, its monthly water usage was equivalent to the monthly usage of over 96,000 households.

The paper draws on a research project assessing the water governance impact of Intel’s semiconductor production in Ireland. It is to present qualitative data collected over the first six months of the project on a wide range of water infrastructures that altogether constitute Intel’s water catchment: bogs, rivers, reservoirs, treatment plants, stormwaters, groundwaters, seawaters. At the intersection of environmental justice and feminist STS, the research asks whose water ontologies and water futures are being dis/empowered within and through Intel’s semiconductor production process.

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This contribution foregrounds the chemical relations mediated by water in and around the chip industry in Hsinchu. Drawing from an understanding of water through embodiment and toxicity as embedded in systems of power, I examine how local residents sense, know, contest and live with water pollution.

Paper long abstract

“The semiconductor industry is a chemical industry.” I follow this provocation from Po-jen Hsu of Taiwan Environmental Rights Foundation to examine chemical relations through water pollution in the semiconductor industry in Hsinchu, Taiwan, home of the chip manufacturer TSMC. In an ethnographic case study, I trace the knowability and contestability of water pollution through shifting chemical relations between chip production, rivers, toxicants, humans and nonhumans.

Decades ago, residents used bodily sensing techniques to make visible and sense-able copper and ammonia pollution caused by the chip industry, organizing sniffing groups and coordinating campaigns to demand corporate accountability and government regulation (Chiu, 2011). With the AI boom and the era of “2nm” chips, the dominant pollutant is PFAS, a group of “forever chemicals” both invisible and imperceptible. Citizens, researchers and activists have to conceptualize new ways of testing discharged wastewater and proof of damage to fight for their right to clean drinking water.

Building on existing research in environmental justice and high-tech industry development (Chiu, 2011 & 2014; Chuang, 2021; Gabrys, 2013; Jobin, 2023; Pellow & Park, 2002), as well as a hydrofeminist understanding of water through embodiment (Neimanis, 2017) and a decolonial feminist STS understanding of chemical relations in the context of pollution (Liboiron et al., 2018; Murphy, 2008 2017), I ask: what does it mean to live with and contest water pollution? How does an embodied relation with water inform understanding and knowledge of water quality? What are the new techniques and strategies in testing for water pollution?

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The proposed paper compares semiconductor innovation ecosystems in three European national contexts, finding, beside expected differences, striking indications of a ‘Silicon Isomorphism’ which provides insights into the potential and limitations of reproducing Silicon Valley elsewhere.

Paper long abstract

Much of current innovation policy aims at creating the ‘Silicon Valleys of tomorrow.’ These places are often characterized as (regional) innovation ecosystems. Innovation ecosystems tend to be researched from a managerial or policy perspective, with a focus on how decision-making can enhance the ability to produce economic value or to deliver on policy aims like technology sovereignty. Countering positivist assumptions made in such accounts, innovation studies have recently taken a cultural turn, pursuing a situated understanding of the bottom-up dynamics undergirding innovation.

Following this turn, the proposed paper traces how likening certain places to Silicon Valley configures innovation. It draws on an ongoing (December 2025 – November 2026) comparison of Silicon Saxony (Dresden, GER), Silicon Fen (Cambridge, UK) and the emerging Silicon Valley of Health and Food (Gelderland, NL) in terms of their respective geographies, histories, governance structures, cultures, economic structures, political regimes and technological foci. Despite significant differences between the cases, specific institutional forms and imaginaries of innovation remain characteristically convergent.

To understand this convergence-in-divergence, we coin the concept of Silicon Isomorphism, a tendency by researchers, industry, and professional organizations to enact limited expectations about what ‘good’ innovation looks like, by what means it should be promoted by whom and on whose behalf. Silicon Isomorphism highlights both similarities and distinctive features of cross-border model transfer in innovation ecosystems, taking into consideration their specific socio-technical infrastructuration. These insights into the potential and limitations of policies imitating Silicon Valley elsewhere can inform strategies for developing regional innovation ecosystems.

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This paper develops a capitalist critique of data centres. Drawing on the concept of cannibal capitalism, we historically and ethnographically examine data centres as key sites for understanding how capital devours and expels the very innovations it brings into being.

Paper long abstract

The data centre assemblage, composed of silicon, GPUs, CPUs, cooling technology, and human labour, has been central to the rise of high-tech computation since the 1960s to the present. Notably, it has provided off-location storage and computing power to its users at a distance. While massive buildouts of AI data centres colonise the earth, they are by far a stable entity. On the contrary, every “new” data centre from the mainframe computer to AI technology has required a complete overhaul. Our presentation reads such processes of industrial transformation through the lens of cannibal capitalism (Fraser, 2023; Jay & Conklin, 2020). “Silicon Lives” are thus entrenched in “Silicon Ghosts”, suggesting that data centre innovation and data centre collapse go hand-in-hand.

With an area focus on Germany, we study Silicon Ghosts in several forms. For instance, we look at the cannibalisation of older industries by data centres, with the example of a US hyperscaler swallowing the former industrial areas in Frankfurt. Similarly, we study how AI hyperscalers lead to the collapse of older data centres, as retrofitting existing infrastructures for new computational demands is deemed unprofitable (Brodie & Velkova, 2021; Velkova, 2023). Lastly, we turn to the afterlife of capital’s digestion, tracing how cables, coolants, and silicon chips circulate as waste.