Verónica Uribe del Aguila is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. Previously, she completed a master of arts in design studies at Parsons, the School of Design. Uribe has longstanding practice of using critical methods to examine how actors experience technology differently along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and geographical location. In her research and teaching, she draws together media studies, feminist and de/postcolonial science and technology studies (STS), critical geography, and political economy to examine how technology’s supply chains shape and are shaped by practices of self-determination. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation.

Uribe’s work investigates the interplay of overlapping sovereignty discourses and self-determination practices built around technology, and the limits of these discourses and practices for producing better futures. Her work contributes to STS by advancing an analysis of technoscience informed by political economy and critical geography. 

Her manuscript, “Technology as Sovereignty: Hardware Technopolitics and Property Relations in Mexico,” analyzes how different stakeholders in the global high-tech supply chain—hardware developers and tech manufacturing workers—construct technology as an instance of sovereignty in the Mexican Bajio, North America’s largest industrial corridor. Her analysis makes explicit the tension between developers’ (and users’) claims of ownership over new forms of property and workers’ claims of personal rights over the bodies that produce them.