The Saga of Teofila: Slavery and Credit Circulation in 19th-Century Rio de Janeiro

This paper follows the enslaved woman Teofila from captivity to freedom in 19th-century Rio de Janeiro. To become a free woman, Teofila had to navigate the complex private credit networks of the West African community of the Brazilian capital city. With limited banking activity, the cariocas relied on one another for their financial needs, making for a highly convivial credit market that reflected and reinforced the vast inequalities of Brazilian slave society. While following Teofila through the courts of Rio de Janeiro, this paper will demonstrate that one of the cornerstones of the city’s credit market was the presence of an intertwined relationship between credit and private property. The commerce in human beings like Teofila produced thousands of negotiable titles, with slavery working as a propeller for credit circulation and one of its pillars – slave property was the primary collateral for unpaid debts

Convivial Making: Power in Public Library Creative Places

In 2011, public libraries began to provide access to collaborative creative places, frequently called “makerspaces.” The professional literature portrays these as beneficial for communities and individuals through their support of creativity, innovation, learning, and access to high-tech tools such as 3D printers. As in longstanding “library faith” narratives, which pin the library’s existence to widely held values, makerspace rhetoric describes access to tools and skills as instrumental for a stronger economy or democracy, social justice, and/or individual happiness. The rhetoric generally frames these places as empowering. Yet the concept of power has been neither well-theorized within the library makerspace literature nor explored in previous studies. This study fills the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of power, as described by the stakeholders, including staff, trustees, and users of the library. Potentially, library creative places could be what Ivan Illich calls convivial tools: tools that manifest social relations involving equitable distributions of power and decision-making. A convivial tool ensures that users may decide to which end they would like to apply the tool, and thus are constitutive of human capabilities and social justice. However, the characterization of library makerspaces in the literature evokes a technologically deterministic entrepreneurialism that marginalizes many types of making, and reduces the power of individuals to choose the ends to which they put this tool. This multi-site ethnographic study seeks to unravel the currents of power within three public library creative places. Through participant observation, document analysis, and interviews, the study traces the mechanisms and processes by which power is distributed, as enacted by institutional practices—the spaces, policies, tools, and programs—or through individual practices. The study finds seven key tensions that coalesce around the concept of conviviality, and also reveals seven capabilities of convivial tools that the users and providers of these spaces identify as crucial to their successful and satisfying implementation. As a user-centered exploration of the interactions of power in a public institution, this study can benefit a range of organizations that aim to further inclusion, equity, and social justice

Digital Health and Africa: an emerging narrative

The potential and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to cater for digital health depend on the context and its meaning-making. Therefore, the concepts and materialization of digital health in Africa are specific for Africa. This transdisciplinary and reflexive paper introduces and positions African particulars pertaining ICTs and an emerging narrative of digital health in Africa. The narrative pivots decentering and the necessary interplay of African community engagement, workforce enhancement, and thought leadership as the means towards inclusive and embedded digital health interventions in Africa

Digitization, innovation, and participation: digital conviviality of the Google Cultural Institute

2018 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document

Post-Ottoman Coexistence

In Southeast Europe, the Balkans, and Middle East, scholars often refer to the “peaceful coexistence” of various religious and ethnic groups under the Ottoman Empire before ethnonationalist conflicts dissolved that shared space and created legacies of division. "Post-Ottoman Coexistence", interrogates ways of living together and asks what practices enabled centuries of cooperation and sharing, as well as how and when such sharing was disrupted. Contributors discuss both historical and contemporary practices of coexistence within the context of ethno-national conflict and its aftermath

CUBA: Artificial conviviality and user-behaviour analysis in web-feeds

Conviviality is a concept of great depth that plays an important role in any social interaction. A convivial relation between individuals is one that allows the participating individuals to behave and interact with each other following a set of conventions that are shared, commonly agreed upon, or at least understood. This presupposes an implicit or an explicit regulation mechanism based on consensus or social contracts and applies to the behaviours and interactions of participating individuals. With respect to an intelligent web-based system, an applicable social contribution is the give of assistance to other users in situations that are unclear and in guiding him to find the right decision whenever a conflict arises. Such a convivial social biotope deeply depends on both implicit and explicit co-operation and collaboration of natural users inside a community. Here, the individual conviviality may benefit from “The Wisdom of Crowds”, which fosters a dynamic understanding of the user’s behaviour and a strong influence of an individual’s well being to another person(s). The web-based system CUBA focus on such a behavioural analysis through profiling and demonstrates a convivial stay within a web-based feed system

RITPU • IJTHE

Social media in highe

Expressions and embeddings of deliberative democracy in mutual benefit digital goods

Since democracy is so desirable and digital technologies are so flexible and widespread it is worth asking what sort of digital technologies can, through use, enhance democratic practice. This question is addressed in three stages. First, the notion of Mutual Benefit Digital Goods (MBDGs) is developed as a tool for discerning the digital goods that hold a potential for nurturing democratic virtues. MBDGs are those digital goods that allow a user to make such goods one’s own and to put something of oneself into them. This can be achieved either directly, by working at creating a derivative of a digital good, or by engaging a community of production for digital goods. The second stage is the identification of a theory of democracy that is adequate for discussing democracy in relation to cyberspace. Deliberative democracy, particularly as presented by Dryzek, is put forward as the most appropriate conception of democracy to be used. This conception makes it possible to overcome the difficulties posed by the notions of citizens and borders as presented in other conceptions of democracy. In relation to cyberspace, such notions are particularly problematic. In the last stage, MBDGs and deliberative democracy are brought together by means of the theory of technological mediation and Feenberg's theory of technological subversion. The theory of mediation holds that the use of technologies modulates our moral landscape. Because of mediation, subversion of digital technologies is always self-expressive to some extent. Therefore it exhibits the same grounding characteristics as deliberative democracy: mutual respect, reciprocity, provisionality and equality. Since MBDGs are most open to subversion, they are also the digital technologies with the most potential for fostering democracy. This claim is corroborated by looking at iconic MBDGs (Free/ Libre/ Open Source Software and Wikipedia) and revealing how the virtues necessary for deliberation are manifest in some of the activities surrounding these digital goods. The ideas presented, if accepted, have practical implications for institutions desirous of enhancing democratic practice. Such institutions ought to evaluate their choices on digital technologies also on grounds of democratic potential, reduce obstacles to alternative appropriation of digital goods through regulation, and foster MBDGs