Global Media & Policy Seminar Series: Nicola Bidwell - 'Community Networks and the Identity of African Innovation'

Event date
3 May 2019
Event time
17:00 - 18:30
Oxford week
Venue
Manor Road Building - Seminar Room B / YouTube Live (PCMLP OXFORD)
Speaker(s)
Nic Bidwell
Decolonising in the gaps: Community Networks and the identity of African innovation
 
Community Networks (CNs), or decentralised computer networks built and operated by citizens for citizens, offer an alternative to dominant views about innovation in Africa. This talk reflects on ethnography and participant experience of CNs in Uganda, South Africa and Namibia. I show that CNs in rural Africa exhibit characteristics that resist some of the ways that the postcolony exhibits, as Mbembe writes, ‘a form of private indirect government and novel technologies of domination’. 
 
In this seminar, I will refer to the ways CNs fill in gaps created by electric and telecommunications capitalisms and a ‘universal’ paradigm for technology production. I suggest that CNs in rural Africa afford a type of agency, that differs from typical views on ICT-access, equality and empowerment. This is because they emphasise ‘wealth in people’ in setting-up, maintaining and using infrastructure. Thus, I link values about sociality in African CNs to the importance of actively creating self- and communal identity in liberation.
 
To join the seminar remotely, tune into YouTube Live (PCMLP Oxford) at 17:00 BST. Send us your questions/comments on YouTube or using #GlobalMediaQs on Twitter. 

 

Speaker bio:

Nic Bidwell’s research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has15-year’s success in community-based tech design in the global south. This comprises work with rural inhabitants of Argentina, Australia, India, Kenya, Indonesia, Mexico, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia and Uganda, including indigenous groups, that is sensitive to local meanings in relation to resourcefulness, innovation, inclusion, identity etc. She is known for catalysing new directions in HCI e.g. initiating the first indigenous-led digital design panel (2008), first publications about decolonalism (2015) in the ACM and co-founded AfriCHI, the African ACM conference on computer-human interaction.

Since the end of 2017, Nic undertook multiple case research about community networks in the global south, for the Association for Progressive Communications (APC’s), Local Network Access Project https://www.apc.org/en/project/local-access-networks-can-unconnected-connect-themselves . She is founding advisor to Groot-Aub community network, near her home in Namibia, and mentors on AFCHIX USAID Women Connect project about gender-sensitive approaches to community networks. Nic is a Professor in Graduate Studies at the International University of Management, Namibia.
 
About the PCMLP Global Media & Policy Seminar Series

The Global Media & Policy Seminar Series is an online seminar series jointly organised between the University of Oxford’s Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies) and the University of Johannesburg’s School of Communication. The series fosters an international dialogue about pressing issues affecting new media and human rights, particularly at the margins. The speakers in this series tackle issues related to technology and policy across different contexts, including (among others) algorithmic bias and inequalities; misinformation and elections; social media and migration; extreme speech online; community-driven internet access solutions; autonomous and feminist infrastructure; and privacy. This innovative global seminar series uses the power of technology to bridge the geographic and epistemic distance between the global north and the global south – to bring together critical perspectives on new media in context and facilitate a diverse dialogue on the most important questions of human rights, internet governance and our technologically mediated lives.

 

 

Organised by
Programme in Comparative Media Law & Policy

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