Standard Research Grant: How Marginalized Populations Self-Organize with Digital Tools: Ethnographic Case Studies in Africa and China

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Economic development has been understood as a science of labor and capital relations that would be successfully worked out by macroeconomists. Technology was a part of this formula from the very beginning with emerging interest in the field after World War II. Originally the simple transfer of Western technologies was envisioned as an automatic boon to productivity in impoverished regions of the Global South. New ways, however, of understanding the issue are emphasizing the formulation of socio-technical systems in which tools, people, programs, policies, and/or business models are brought together to operate in concert. This project builds on this shift in focus by bringing theory from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to bear on the issue of socio-economic development. The investigators will complete a comparative study using ethnographic techniques to examine how populations marginalized from the global economy define and pursue development. They will consider how digital connectivity tools have lately become implicated in these efforts. The topic will be explored through four diverse case studies. The cases include: 1) IT sector firms and their workers in Kenyans outsourcing industry 2) migrant women service workers in China who bring back tools and technical knowledge to their rural home areas and the work of an NGO (non-governmental organization) to coordinate these workers, 3) Ghana's market women and their trade activities that range from local to international in scope and increasingly involve communication technologies for negotiation and coordination work, and 4) household money management and, in particular, crisis handling among low income, rural and urban Ugandans and the role of mobile phones in these practices. The broader impact of this work will stem from real-world findings about how socio-economic development efforts are pursued and how they succeed or fail. Through conference participation, invited talks, and web-based publishing this findings will be made available to numerous aid agencies.