Friday, Nov 1: Elisa OREGLIA: Dissertation
Talk:
From Farm to Farmville: Circulation, Adoption, and Use of ICT
between Urban and Rural China.
In the mid-2000s, China began a set of policies to "informatize"
the countryside,
i.e. to bring Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to
rural residents in order to
improve their economic conditions. These policies posit the
countryside as a world of "less",
compared to urban areas, and portray people who are at the margins
of China's modernization
(migrant workers, rural residents, older people, and farmers) as in
need of ICT to access more
and better information, and, as a consequence, more and better
opportunities. In contrast to
this widespread view of marginalized users as passive recipients of
technologies, I look at the
diffusion and appropriation of ICT such as mobile phones and
computers among rural residents
and migrant workers in their own terms: not as foils for elite views
of why they would/should
go online, but rather as people who discover the opportunities
offered by ICT that are of
interest to them, and try to use these opportunities as best as they
can. By retracing the
paths through which ICT travel in urban and rural China and the
social relations that are
maintained, renewed, and reinvented along the way, I show how people
at the margins "invent"
themselves as users, find a connection between their lives and
technology, and participate
from afar to China's rapid modernization.
A presentation of this work was was named the best graduate
student paper
on China and inner Asia at the 2013 annual meeting of the
Association for Asian Studies by
the AAS' China and Inner Asia Council. Elisa Oreglia is completing her PhD in the School of
Information. More at
http://ercolino.eu/eo/.
FORTHCOMING
Friday, Nov 8: Niels W. LUND, Univ. of Tromso, Norway: Which
discipline does Document Theory
belong to? Wrapping up 25 years of work in progress.
In the design of information services (libraries, archives, data
sets,
websites, etc.), you deal with documents in relation to their
material
nature (paper, software, hardware etc. etc.), their social status
(legal
issues with access etc., impact), and their mental/cognitive aspects
(How are they been understood?). But in the world of higher
education,
you still have a relatively sharp division between humanities,
social
sciences, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics),
so what can you do when you feel you belong to all three academic
worlds?
Niels Windfeld Lund will soon retire as Professor, University of
Tromso, Norway, where he was the founding director of the program in
Documentation Studies. He has twice been a visiting scholar here.
More at Bio
card.
Friday, Nov 15: Nick MERRILL: Alternative Visions of Internet
Connectivity.
Clifford LYNCH: The Failure of Stewardship Organizations.
(Continued).
Friday, Nov 22: Michael BUCKLAND: Support for scholarly editing.
Friday, Nov 29: Thanksgiving: No seminar meeting.
Friday, Dec 6: Nick MERRILL: Alternative Visions of Internet
Connectivity. Karen SMITH-YOSHIMURA: Registering Researchers in
Authority Files.