April 23, 2012

Post-Colonial Techno-preneur

The Postcolonial technopreneur

The situation: The imaginary of the young entrepreneur 

One of the most interesting stories of the global neoliberal perspective is the story of the young social entrepreneur. The story goes like this: young people all around the world have the desire and conviction to work for social and political change in their respective communities, but they lack the right set of conceptual tools (knowledge about and of how to start a business) and the capital (be it human, infrastructure or financial). A particular type on entrepreneurship popular today involves the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) within and for entrepreneurship. Technopreneurship or infopreneurship, some of the avatars of this idea, have in common the same assumption: The techno-utopian promise of the internet and other digital technologies as tools of deliverance into a place with free and ever-accessible knowledge – a place where we all thrive in freedom and societal progress. 

Technology entrepreneurship has been picking up quite fast in what is termed the global south (for my purposes, everywhere else besides Western Europe, North America and Australia) in the last 5-10 years. From Bogota to Bangalore, Singapore and Nairobi, entrepreneurial aspirations of technology being used for social good have taken the form of formal school curricula and academic degrees, non-academic short courses, online programmes, incubators, accelerators, fellowships, scholarships and various others. In short, the idea that the best way young people can be agents for change, not only in a market setting, but also civic and even ethical manner, is through an entrepreneurial path, carrier a lot of weight and should be scrutinized thoroughly. 

The problem: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” 

The story I briefly described above can be particularly risky. Digital technologies have a way of obscuring the socio-cultural and political theoretical frameworks and assumptions that accompany their use.  I am afraid that what is conceived as humanitarian projects can end up perpetuating old power hierarchies and cultural biases . Think, for example, of the Kony2012 campaign. I do not think that the Kony debacle was a one-time occurrence; instead, it represents an endemic and system-wise bias. Entrepreneurship, and in particular techno-entrepreneurship, tends to have a rather naïve perception of the relationship between technology and society. In particular, there remains within entrepreneurship a simplistic and reductionist conceptualization of how technologies are embedded in a web of social, political and cultural aspects. 

This knowledge disconnect is one I want to help tackle. I want to establish an organization which serves as a mediator space between the realm of technopreneurship – roughly defined as young start-ups looking to use digital technologies in social / political projects – and academicians and other knowledge experts  on the social studies of technoscience. I envision an organization which works directly and on a case-by-case basis with start-ups and their stake-holder community around the global south to co-create knowledge about and on 1) The local, embedded and contingent character of digital technologies; 2) The ways in which knowledge gets transformed, re-conceptualized and appropriated in various contexts; and 3) How 1 and 2 can be used in their particular projects. 

The idea: Post-colonial technopreneur

Broadly speaking, what I seek to investigate with this project is the ways in which the technological entrepreneurship paradigm can be fused, hybridized and placed in a dialogue with questions, concerns and frames of action from both Science and Technology Studies (STS) and post-colonialism. This outcome of this re-invention and hybridization is the postcolonial technopreneur. The post-colonial technopreneur is aware of the complex webs of power that delineate the horizons in which her enterprise is embedded, and she is conscious that technological developments can often become entrenched in novel forms of exploitation and repression. The post-colonial technopreneur is both attentive to and thinks strategically about the socio-cultural conditions in which her project develop, or as Michael Fischer puts it  “the local ecologies, synergies, and networks of knowledge production”. 

April 21, 2012
April 15, 2012

WEIRD!

To borrow a phrase from Heinrich (2010), most of academic research and knowledge we have comes from weird people: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. 

What about the other 95%? 

April 11, 2012
It seems to me that methods that imagine the world to be relatively neat and tidy and try enact it in that way, are missing the point. Worse, they are seeking to stipulate and so to enact an order that is epistemologically mistaken, ontologically unrealistic, and politically obnoxious. I sense this every time I have to fill in a questionnaire. Usually, almost always, it seems that the questions don’t quite fit. And I feel it, too, when I have to respond to social science inquiries about the rigour of my approach to research, to research methods, and to research hypotheses. Usually, for instance, I cannot tell beforehand how the data will be analysed. Often, indeed, I have no idea what will and what will not count as data. The forms of ordering implied in such inquiries do not match the social realities with which I wrestle. No doubt this is sometimes a straightforward failure in my sociology. But I think it is also a failure in how we collectively imagine our methods and their relation to the real. My hypothesis is that our collective understanding of method seeks, albeit imperfectly, to enact forms of order, but that the realities always escape.
John Law (sociologist)