Doing Technologies. Practices, Places and Feelings of Technocapitalism

The seminar sets focus on the various geographies of practices, places and feelings of „doing technologies“. We will look at the daily life of global tech entrepreneurship in various places; trying to understand the intensities and intimacies of coding, hacking, building prototypes, start-up funding, designing futures, being revolutionary, and always hustling to survive. By doing so, we will empirically ground, de- and reconstruct globally circulating techno-optimistic narratives. Whether in Nairobi, Offenbach, Rio, Homberg (Efze) or rural USA, tech entrepreneurs have become subjectified into actors of regional development, national progress or poverty alleviation. To research the geographies of technocapitalism, we will attend to the daily practices and feelings of tech entrepreneurs and scrutinize places of creativity such as makerspaces, hackathons, tech hubs or co-working spaces. Thus, this seminar consists of reading and discussing academic literature, visiting places of tech work and (digitally) talking to tech experts from all over the globe.