Technology as Sovereignty: Open Hardware Politics and New Property Relations

This project will examine how citizens, including engineers and policy makers, understand and pursue “technological sovereignty” today. Since the COVID-19 pandemic global supply chain breakdown, various governments have established domestic high-tech supply chains policies as part of their sovereignty agendas. To better understand the political effects of these emergent constructions of technology as sovereignty, this project will examine how these claims affect technology production regimes and the property relations. This research benefits policy makers interested in technology, trade, and manufacturing policies and their impact on industry and well-being. This research also benefits designers and technologists engaged in innovative manufacturing practices by showing how policy affects innovative capacity. Findings from this project will provide the ground for developing a workshop to bring policymakers' and developers’ attention to the ethical dimension of component procurement and labor sourcing in technology production. This project examines technological sovereignty and its varied impacts on workers, engineers, and citizens via the study of open hardware practices. It uses qualitative methods, including ethnographic observations, archival research, and semi-structured interviews. Ethnographic observations at electronic workers’ organizations and open hardware firms will show how technological sovereignty affects and is created through open hardware practices. Archival research at institutional archives will help track changes in these constructions over time. Ethnographic and archival data will be supplemented by interviews with key stakeholders on motivations, justifications, tensions, and contradictions surrounding open hardware . Finally, this project will digitize electronic manufacturing workers' archives, contributing to their organizing practices toward more ethical supply chains. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.