"I Am Seeing the Power Behind Technology": New Media and Politics in Kenya's "Silicon Savannah" (Lisa Poggiali)

IN THIS PRESENTATION OF A WORK IN PROGRESS, DCC Postdoctoral Fellow Lisa Poggiali explores how new media technologies – specifically digital maps – mediate the social and ethical landscape of development politics in Nairobi, Kenya. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research, she focuses on how two groups – residents of an informal settlement and the foreign development workers who initiate technology training programs in it – express competing ideas about the uses and values of open source software. She argues that the technological imaginaries and sociotechnical practices of settlement residents confound established political frameworks of both liberal democracy and cultural particularism, and challenge the notion that we can analyze media content apart from its form. In this way, Dr. Poggiali works toward a theory of politics and media that questions normative understandings of both.

LISA POGGIALI received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University in 2015. Her research has been financially supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; her work is forthcoming in Cultural Anthropology.

SHEILA JASANOFF is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. A pioneer in her field, she has authored more than 100 articles and chapters and is author or editor of a dozen books, including The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, and Designs on Nature. Her work explores the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and policy of modern democracies, with particular attention to the nature of public reason.

ASWIN PUNATHAMBEKAR is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (NYU Press, 2013), co-editor of Global Bollywood (NYU Press, 2008), and co-editor of Television At Large in South Asia (2013).