Doctoral Dissertation Research: Starting-up with the State: Computing, Entrepreneurship, and Governance

__________________________________________________________________________________________________ NSF Abstract - Sandeep Mertia

This project is an ethnographic study of cultures of computing in start-up incubators, focusing on digital infrastructure, entrepreneurial practices, and state policies. The goal of this project is to critically examine the historical, socio-technical, infrastructural, governmental, and aspirational dimensions computing in start-up incubators, to advance comparative social scientific understandings of the global assemblages of technology start-ups and the promissory futures of digital innovation.

In carrying out this research in the context of the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, this project also opens a new vantage point for looking at disruptive socio-technical changes, particularly in postcolonial contexts.

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 do computing in start-up incubators program seek to tether the recent global history of digital innovation and disruption to national futures?

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 computing start-up incubators ecosystem, this project contributes to global 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 economy.

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.