This project is an ethnographic study of startups for computing incubators. It will focus on identifying how digital infrastructure, entrepreneurial practices, and state policies intersect to support technology start-ups. It will explore the role of the state in shaping and cultivating the synergistic futures of techno-entrepreneurship and governance. The goal of this project is to examine the historical, socio-technical, infrastructural, governmental, and aspirational dimensions of startup’s that have the support of state government. The project will develop social scientific understandings of technology start-ups that will identify factors shaping digital innovation. In the context of the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, this project will provide a new vantage point for understanding social and technological challenges facing computer start-ups. The findings of this project will be of interest to decision makers in local governments, business management and youth employment.
This project ethnographically addresses three research questions. 1) How do digital infrastructures such as government application programming interfaces (APIs), platforms, and mobile apps shape—and how are they shaped by—the dual pursuit of governance and entrepreneurial value? 2) How do techno-entrepreneurs from different social backgrounds navigate the everyday practices of start-up incubation? How are they reimagining their agential capacities for innovation and social mobility amidst the on-going structural shifts due to the COVID-19 pandemic? 3) How does the recent global history of digital innovation shape the future of technology start-ups? Based on multi-sited fieldwork, this project comparatively follows start-up incubators in a metropolitan and a tier-two city to spatialize the growing interface between the state and start-ups. The researcher deploys historical, virtual, and in-person ethnographic methods, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, digital archival and software studies approaches, to track the former futures and the everyday imaginaries and practices of state-sponsored start-up incubation. This project combines interdisciplinary scholarship in STS, media studies, anthropology and related fields, to think through the three-way relations between the postcolonial state and technological nationalism, digital innovation and capitalism, and aspirational futures and social mobility. By focusing on the emergent relations between digital infrastructure and innovation in a start-up ecosystem, this project contributes to STS research on cultures of computing. By comparatively studying the techno-entrepreneurial journeys of aspirational youth in two cities, this project seeks to illuminate the hopes and discontents associated with an ever-accelerating digital.
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.
