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Paper short abstract

We examine techno-nationalism in Türkiye as a temporal and affective infrastructure that organizes youth subjectivity and civic devotion. Through the National Technology Initiative and TEKNOFEST, technological labor becomes ritualized preparation for sustaining national futures.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines techno-nationalism in Türkiye as a temporal and affective infrastructure that organizes youth subjectivity, obligation, and civic devotion. Focusing on the state-led National Technology Initiative (NTI) and its flagship mega-event TEKNOFEST, we conceptualize “national technology” not merely as an innovation agenda but as a socio-technical formation that composes a moral relationship to time, endurance, and collective destiny.

Building on STS approaches that understand infrastructures as devices that render the future actionable (Stine & Volmar 2021), we argue that the NTI operates as a temporal governance apparatus. Through competition cycles, prototyping regimes, sustainability rhetoric, and calls for nationwide mobilization, it structures a public time order centered on continuity, preparedness, and deferred fulfillment. Youth are positioned less as political actors of the present than as embodied carriers of a national future to be continuously cultivated and sustained.

Within this configuration, TEKNOFEST functions as both infrastructure and ritual. Public demonstrations and collective spectacles transform technological competence into experiential verification of national capability. These practices ritualize repetition, normalize disciplined self-work, and cultivate affective states such as pride, hope, and responsibility. Echoing Nikolas Rose’s notion of “governing the soul” (1999), techno-nationalism operates through ethical self-formation as much as state discourse.

Drawing on discourse analysis and interviews with young participants, we show that this temporal-affective order is negotiated rather than mechanically reproduced. By analyzing techno-nationalism as a temporal infrastructure linking governance, ritual, and affect, the paper contributes to STS debates on how infrastructures shape civic devotion and the futures imagined as worth sustaining.