Networking Rurality Part 2

Abstract

Rural communities' information infrastructures are slow to build out and prone to breakdown, potentially hampering their economic opportunities. Technology companies are addressing these challenges by developing new networking capacities for farms and rural communities, often with state-based support and incentives. Rural connectivity is promised to transform the provision of data to, and collection of data from, rural and remote areas, and thereby to transform rural life. But will such transformation be positive and seamless? What approaches might STS scholars bring to bear to critically analyze the digitalization of rural life? For instance, what pre-existing mechanisms of social cohesion in farm and fishing communities might be disrupted by the push to digitalize? Will networking technologies which enable economic mobility also place pressures on rural practices to conform to urban imaginations? Will rural information connectivity projects follow state-supported infrastructure projects like rail, telegraph and telephone, which led to the consolidation of agricultural and communications industries? How does high-bandwidth information communication access and its effects vary based on geopolitical contexts and relative wealth of rural communities? This panel seeks to explore the intersection of the rural (and ideas of the rural) with novel ICT technologies like internet infrastructure provision. It examines how the possibilities and problematics of networked rurality are co-constructed by technology developers, rural residents, and policy makers, and how they are shaped by or diverge from long histories of rural expropriation. The panel will also speculate on how emergent technologies could be channeled into alternative trajectories.

Discussant

• Kelly Bronson, Department Of Sociology And Anthropology, University Of Ottawa

Individual Presentations

• Asset Maps and the Digitization of Rural Opportunity - Jean Hardy, Michigan State University

• Resource Wars Against Rural Communities and Their Networks - Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, Cornell University

• The Preservation of Embodied Masculinity in Tech-Altered Workplaces - Jenna Burrell, School of Information, UC Berkeley

• Welcome to the Digital Village: Networking Geographies of Agrarian Change - Hilary Oliva Faxon, UC Berkeley

• Technologies of Land Dispossession: Digital Agriculture and Legibility - Jen Liu, Cornell University

Session Organizers

• Jen Liu, Cornell University

• Phoebe Sengers, Cornell University

• Kelly Bronson, Department Of Sociology And Anthropology, University Of Ottawa

• Matt Comi, University of Kansas