Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism Anita Say Chan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014)

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/166163/1/plar12233.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/166163/2/plar12233_am.pd

ICTD in Corporate Social Responsibility: Changing priorities in international development funding?

The study of technology and development has, since the mid-1990s, generated significant query into the impacts and adoption of technology within resource-deprived communities and geographies. Yet, there has been comparatively less query into the overall changes in development thinking that this “era of ICTD (Information and Communication Technologies for Development)” has brought along. In this paper, we examine ICTD from a funding perspective and find that technology-related giving plays an increasingly central role in the international social investments of several major firms. While an interest in spending on technology is indeed central to the interests of corporations in the technology sector, we find that a sizeable number of companies that do not make their money from technology are nonetheless including what one may consider “ICTD” projects in their corporate social responsibility (CSR) funding profiles. In our examination of this trend, we find that companies with profiles as diverse as banking (Citigroup), energy (ExxonMobil), and retail (Walmart) feature on this list of supporters for the technology and development cause. We explore the extent to which this can be considered a serious trend, and start a discussion on its broader implications, both in the reframing of ICTD and for the redistribution of sectoral composition of private aid flows towards international development as a whole

Grassroots Campaign in Technology-Enabled Elections: Madurai and Thiruvananthapuram in 2019 Indian Elections

As a critical site of democratic action, grassroots electoral campaigning is undergoing a transition with the influence of internet affordances in the political mobilizational areas of narrative building, campaign management, data collection and analysis. Through an ethnographic study conducted in Madurai and Thiruvananthapuram during the months prior to the 2019 Indian Parliamentary Elections, the study attempts to map the technology adoption among political workers, in relation to their party/leaders, voters, and other stakeholders in the electoral landscape. Using the typology presented in the new repertoire of social movement action, the authors categorize internet-based and internet-supported campaigning tools, according to the threshold of risk and effort involved in undertaking the activities. Illustrating with perspectives from the grassroots political agents, the paper aspires to extend the literature related to digital political mobilization and contribute to the study of democratic systems

Women over 40, foreigners of color, and other missing persons in globalizing mediascapes: understanding marketing images as mirrors of intersectionality

Media diversity studies regularly invoke the notion of marketing images as mirrors of racism and sexism. This article develops a higher-order concept of marketing images as “mirrors of intersectionality.” Drawing on a seven-dimensional study of coverperson diversity in a globalizing mediascape, the emergent concept highlights that marketing images reflect not just racism and sexism, but all categorical forms of marginalization, including ableism, ageism, colorism, fatism, and heterosexism, as well as intersectional forms of marginalization, such as sexist ageism and racist multiculturalism. Fueled by the legacies of history, aspirational marketing logics, and an industry-wide distribution of discriminatory work, marketing images help to perpetuate multiple, cumulative, and enduring advantages for privileged groups and disadvantages for marginalized groups. In this sense, marketing images, as mirrors of intersectionality, are complicit agents in the structuration of inequitable societies

A Capabilities View of Accessibility in Policy and Practice in Jordan and Peru

We explore the recent evolution of accessibility-related policy in Jordan and Peru, and specifically consider issues around assistive technology access for people with severe vision impairments. We find differences in capacity development and institutions in the two countries over time and how it impacts the ways in which recent policy consultations have taken place, and propose a capabilities framework as a means to examine and contextualize these differences. Narratives of assistive technology use by people in both countries emphasize ways in which the capabilities approach is also a valuable tool in understanding aspirations and how social interactions evolve with access to assistive technology. We argue that the findings from Peru and Jordan, given the diversity of policy environments, infrastructure, and socio-economic attitudes towards people with disabilities, give us an important lens towards understanding the evolution of disability rights and policies in various low and middle-income countries around the world

The Anointed Son, The Hired Gun, and the Chai Wala: Enemies and Insults in Politicians’ Tweets in the Run-Up to the 2019 Indian General Elections

This study seeks to assess the prevalence, style, and impact of antagonistic messaging on Twitter in the two years preceding the 2019 Indian General Elections. Focusing on the leadership of the two key parties – the ruling BJP, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah, and the opposition INC’s president Rahul Gandhi, we attempt to understand how the politicians sought to portray each other on Twitter, and how their followers reacted to these characterizations, through the lens of Murray Edelman’s work on the ‘Political Enemy’. By thematically coding tweets and quantitatively analyzing their retweets, we find that negative tweets by and large are significantly more popular for all three politicians, and that the opposition leader allocated a significantly larger proportion of his tweets to attacks. We conclude that while leaders in power and those in opposition may take different stances with messaging, Twitter as a social networking site can perpetuate the online reward for attacking behavior