About this Event
Dr. Verónica Uribe Del Águila's Talk:
Electronic Cats is a circuit design studio based in Aguascalientes, Mexico, in the Bajío, the largest industrial corridor in North America, and a major node in computing supply chains. However, Electronic Cats is more than just a circuit design studio. Until 2017, it was known as Inventors’ House: Hackerspace & Co-working. In other words, its members are hardware-focused hackers (or tinkerers) turned entrepreneurs.
In this talk, I examine the many design strategies (canibaleo, crowdsourcing, distributed manufacturing, and border-crossing) that these hacker entrepreneurs use to navigate computer supply chains. I pay particular attention to the way they use technology design to enact new forms of political participation connected to hacker ethics.
Hackers-entrepreneurs face a challenging situation in the Mexican Bajio. Although they are the focus of many state-led initiatives aimed at fostering innovation and technological sovereignty, their success largely depends on their ability to adapt to the evolving structure of multinational companies that make up the Bajio’s industrial corridor, to which they provide outsourced design services. Their strategies and form of political participation, I argue, constitute a particular situated enactment of hacker ethics. One that accounts for the spatialization of spatialization and the materiality of the digital.
Digital Civics Initiative: New Civic Terrains Speaker Series
The New Civic Terrains Speaker Series convenes public conversations with thinkers and practitioners working at the frontiers of digital civic life. Through lecture and dialogue, the series highlights diverse ways of knowing and making, from empirical research and policy critique to creative practice and grassroots organizing. The series creates a collective opportunity for reflection, debate, and collaboration, fostering cross-disciplinary exchange and inviting audiences to imagine new civic imaginaries for a technologically mediated world.
The Digital Civics Initiative at Northeastern University is an interdisciplinary platform dedicated to understanding and reshaping the civic dimensions of digital technologies in contemporary life. The initiative brings together scholars, educators, activists, technologists, and artists whose work engages questions of technology and education, labor and automation, governance and public institutions, surveillance and data justice, environmental sustainability, community organizing, and human-centered approaches to machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Ryder Hall: Center for Design, 11 Leon Street, Boston, United States
USD 0.00
