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- Convenors:
-
Dagna Rams
(London School of Economics)
Samwel Moses Ntapanta (Aarhus University)
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- Discussant:
-
Jia Hui Lee
(University of Bayreuth)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Geografia i Història 213
- Sessions:
- Thursday 25 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
We are dependent upon machines for most of our tasks. Yet, access, affordability, reliability, breakability, and the afterlives of technologies are unevenly distributed. This panel invites scholars to explore multi-faceted distortions and interfaces of technologies across geographies.
Long Abstract:
Technological adoption (automobility, ICT, AI) in contexts beyond the Western world is often viewed through the prism of access, affordability, reliability, and breakability. Anthropological theorisations of technological consumption in these contexts have given rise to concepts such as ‘invisible users’ (Jenna Burrell) or ‘tropicalisation’ (Jojo Verrips and Birgit Meyer) to emphasize, on the one hand, the non-centrality of such consumers to designers and, on the other hand, the consumers’ need to negotiate technological access and forge strategies vis-a-vis breakdown and emergent waste. Such negotiations create technological gaps, environmental outcomes, and financial risks. We also see discrepant consequences of features of techno-capitalism across geographies, e.g. when it comes to planned obsolescence, intellectual property, and circular economy.
This panel seeks papers that theorize political economies and experience of technological adoption beyond the Western world and use innovative ethnography to respond to the following questions:
- What are the specific avenues for ensuring affordability and access to technologies in contexts marked by financial scarcity?
- What are specific ways in which people engage with technologies and their infrastructures, especially with regards to reliability and breakability?
- How do emergent and changing developments in technological markets (changing forms of IP, circular economy, planned obsolescence, new trends in electrification such as battery use) extend beyond the geographies of their conceptualisation and design?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 25 July, 2024, -Paper long abstract:
Community currencies (CCs) operate alongside national currencies to promote local economic development by fostering internal circulation. CCs have been adopting financial technology to overcome implementational hurdles from issuing paper currencies. This thesis aimed to examine their digital transition using Sarafu Network in Kenya as a case study. Sarafu, which began with paper vouchers in 2010, transitioned to digital in 2016 and blockchain operations in 2018. The study utilizes two frameworks to address the objective. First is the concept of money workwith roots from financial anthropology and sociology, i.e., the hidden labor behind successful financial transactions that used to contextualize the financial journeys of the chamas or lending groups. Second is the affordances lens from Human-Computer Interaction literature to analyze how each voucher format shaped user agency. Across a 2-month immersion from March-May 2024, the study employed a combination of participant observation, key informant interviews, workshops and focus group discussions with a host of stakeholders from chamas, developers and field officers. The findings show that the transition improved the facilitation of the chama’s economic activities–both their typical market transactions as well as traditional reciprocal labor exchanges, by offering more functionalities compared to the analog version of Sarafu Network. The study also finds that there is an inherent trade-off between the affordances and self-governance. Hence, balancing innovation and community needs remains a challenge. Tradeable vouchers via a decentralized exchange as a new functionality afforded by blockchain also raises questions about CC’s territorial nature and implications for local development.
Paper short abstract:
The paper traces the biographical trajectories of German second-hand heavy weight trucks transported across the Atlantic to Bolivia and explores how they are adopted into a community of indigenous trucking that includes human, non-human animals and superhuman Earth Beings alongside technology.
Paper long abstract:
Many logistics companies in Germany replace their fleet of heavy weight trucks after just four years of use due to high maintenance costs and in order to be able to offer drivers attractive new vehicles. Some of these second-hand trucks are shipped on RoRo ships to North Chilean ports, from where they are transported through the Atacama desert to Bolivia and Paraguay. In an ethnography of twelve months, I followed the trajectory of these professionally used automobiles in Germany and Bolivia and investigated how they are introduced to the communities of indigenous long-haul truck driving. In this paper, I am going to present different adoption practices of Bolivian drivers receiving German trucks. I will show that, as in Africa (Grace 2021), automobiles in Bolivia are closely linked to ideas of development and progress (Giucci 2012): Many truck drivers in Bolivia come from rural families serving as transport providers for generations, but who just recently exchanged their llama caravans for motorised vehicles. As will be shown, the drivers subsequently compare their relationship with their trucks to the relationship they had with their herd animals in past times. Concluding, I examine how trucks gain importance in networks of beings that extend beyond humanity including so-called Earth Beings (de la Cadena 2015) and what role miniaturisations of the trucks play in their well-being and productivity (alasitas, illas).
de la Cadena, Marisol (2015): Earth Beings.
Giucci, Guillermo (2012): The cultural life of the automobile.
Grace, Joshua (2021): African motors.
Paper short abstract:
Opposed to treating plastics as harbingers of toxicity, research explores the labors and material transformations of plastics repair. Using artisanal and industrial substances and sensibilities, repairers are attuned to plastics’ unique metabolism and admixture with human and other natures.
Paper long abstract:
Across the world, the large-scale technical systems are in decline, supplanted or supplemented by alternative orders. In the urban centers of the global south, this is evident in the inadequacy of urban infrastructural grids, unable to keep pace with urban growth or the finances of state authorities. In West Africa’s cities, the techno-material and commercial contours of urban water systems reflect such conditions of public divestiture. In the stead of mass-provisioning, smaller scale technical solutions prevail, transforming water access from a durable public good to privately owned and managed technology, commoditized and ephemeral. Widespread reliance on plastic water storage tanks across classes and climes in countries such as Ghana embody this trend.
Focusing on a squad of plastic tank repairers in Ghana’s savannah city of Tamale, this paper examines the care and repair of plastics water storage technologies. Opposed to treating plastics always and already waste and harbingers of toxicity, research explores the labor, knowledge, and material transformations produced in these encounters. Utilizing a combination of artisanal and industrial substances and sensibilities, repairers demonstrate attunement to plastics’ unique metabolism and admixture with human and other natures. They display sensory acuity to the organic attributes of these mass-produced goods: plastic tanks’ interactions with humidity, harsh sunlight and harmattan winds; corrosion induced by contact with sand and soil, and responsiveness to the careful application of heat and fire. Moving beyond broken world thinking, techniques of plastic repair demonstrate labile sense of materiality, bridging organic and inorganic, machinic and human, science and craft.
Paper short abstract:
Why is repair not slowing down in Tanzania, even in the neoliberal market, where things are made to be wasted as soon as possible?
Paper long abstract:
Repairing is an everyday experience for many people in Tanzania. A repairer is always available to tinker with anything. However, acts of repair or finding a repairer do not only appear when things break down. Repair is considered a part of an object’s life and people´s life with an object. As a result, people consume certain products, relying on particular infrastructures and the availability of repair before breakdowns happen. These possibilities and the ability to repair are considered and searched before acquiring the object. This contrasts with a radical emphasis in other economies between the whole, intact and functioning object and the one that is broken, apart, and not working – in need of repair. In Tanzania, as this paper will show, for most people, objects are never really whole and never really broken; even when brokenness happens, objects retain the potentialities of a life, keep memories and the intimate relations that the object gathers with the people. And there is a way to restore those relationships. There is a repairer always ready in handy to repair.