Currently Reading
Bernstein, A., DeGrasse, B., Grossman, R., Paine, C., & Siegel, L. (1980). Silicon Valley: Paradise or Paradox. In Mexican Women in the United States. Chicano Studies Research Center Publications.
Chiu, H.-M. (2011). The Dark Side of Silicon Island: High-Tech Pollution and the Environmental Movement in Taiwan. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 22(1), 40–57.
Pellow, D. N., & Park, L. S.-H. (2002). The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy. NYU Press.
Matthews, G. (2003). Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century. Stanford University Press.
As you might be able to tell, I am currently interested in questions of labor, gender, and the environment as they play out in Silicon Valley. As the Pellow & Park book reminds us:
Next to the nuclear industry, the largest producer of contaminants in the air, land, and water is the electronics industry. Silicon Valley hosts the highest density of Superfund sites anywhere in the nation and leads the country in the number of temporary workers per capita and in workforce gender inequities.As part of the special issue on computing and the environment for Information & Culture that Rebecca Slayton and I are working on, Christophe Lecuyer has a piece on the toxics movement in late 1970s Silicon Valley that is just stellar. That issue should be out in the late summer/early fall.