In this hybrid research seminar on Thursday November 13th, 2025 at 11:00 pm- by Marlise Schneider— will present her research titled " “Let’s bury the term ‘Rust Belt’ and call it the ‘Silicon Heartland’”: how innovation ‘others’ by (re)imagining presents, constructing futures, and disregarding pasts of postindustrial places".
Abstract:
Rust Belt regions are politically demarcated as left behind (economically, politically, socially, culturally), contributing to residents often experiencing a collective sense of hopelessness (Ahmann 2024) and futurelessness (Tutton 2023), characterized by financial, environmental, and material ruination (Mah 2012). Yet innovation initiatives, especially through public policy, are emerging as means to provide radiant futures – but how, to whom, by whom, and at what cost? In the United States (US), the CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS Act) is mobilized as a redevelopment strategy for the Rust Belt, as these ‘lost’ regions of innovations are simultaneously diagnosed with an innovation deficit and implored to innovate (Pfotenhauer et al. 2019). Through innovation-specific initiatives, like microchip manufacturing, Rust Belt regions, lost to today’s innovation economy, are expected to transform into “Silicon Somewhere(s)” (Hospers 2006) aligned with national technological and political objectives, to achieve a ‘better’ future – allegedly for all. Through transnational ethnographic work in the US and Europe, I find that national sociotechnical imaginaries (Pfotenhauer & Jasanoff 2017) homogenize regions’ needs and desires, thus, overlooking locally specific “soft cultural residues“ (Pfotenhauer et al 2023), or socio-political specificities that underpin alternative imaginations of the future. With my work, I investigate the temporal (hauntology, Fisher 2012), spatial (non-place, Augé 1995), and socio-economic (class blindness, Sherman 2024) flattening effects of innovation, through policy instruments, discourses, and imaginaries. My research demonstrates how innovation projects in lost regions come to ‘other’, first by diagnosing regions with specific deficits and then by prescribing specific imaginations of both what the future should be and who belongs in it, bringing to the fore fundamental questions of how futuring (Oomen et al. 2021) organized around innovation and technology overwrites local cultures, histories, and identities.
The zoom link to join the seminar online can be found here. This event is open to the public. All who are interested to this topic are very welcome to join the seminar. After the presentation there will be time for questions and discussion.
For any queries related to our UNU-MERIT Seminar Series, please contact Lizeth Melissa Molina Alvarez and Karthika Baby Sujatha by sending an email to seminars@merit.unu.edu.
