Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Empirical Study of Technological Improvisation

The New School, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation research project is a historical and ethnographic investigation of the relationship between improvisation and technological production in Brazil. It focuses on two sites in Sao Paulo, a contemporary network of public fablabs and the 1970s-80s electronics industry, and its aim is to examine the reconfiguration of improvisation in the context of growing discussions about innovation from the global South. This work will shed light on how practices commonly considered peripheral to sophisticated technological production have been used to remake dominant models of technological development across changing contexts, contributing to current debates on innovation in a global perspective, improvisation as a technical and sociocultural phenomenon, and the relationship between skill and expertise. A key impact of this project will be to expand academic and public discussions about sustainable and inclusive technologies by attending to the cultivation of improvisational technical skills associated with fixing, repurposing, and creating technologies. It will serve to increase the participation of underrepresented minorities in STEM through its focus on community-oriented innovation hubs and collaborative methodologies. It will also provide valuable material for governmental and nongovernmental professionals working in the fields of trade, industrial, and social policy. The researcher will conduct participant observation, in-depth interviews, and media and archival research to understand how improvisation has been conceptualized, used, and valued by fablab users, former electronics workers, technoactivists, municipal agents, and policymakers. The researcher has several specific goals. She will examine what happens when global corporate logics of innovation meet socially embedded experiences of improvisation; this will facilitate contributing to an emergent literature in STS that challenges the typical center-to-periphery arrows of technology transfer and diffusionist innovation theories. She also plans to investigate practices of improvisation in two contexts of technological production, one at the beginning of consumer electronics, where the manufacturing of analog devices was under strict protectionism; the other focusing on new forms of digital production in the globalized neoliberal moment, which will provide a productive genealogy for thinking about improvisation as a contemporary political-economic project in Brazil. She also proposes to combine ethnographic approaches with a robust historical framework to be able to provide a cultural dimension to the study of technology while also advancing discussions of scale. 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.