“Already Global Local”: Complicating notions of innovation and expertise in Africa

• In Event: Digital Imperialism: Colonizing Everyday Lives in the Global South II: Techno-Discourses and Resistances

Abstract

Critiques of development have well established the problematics of top-down development initiatives and implements (Escobar 2001; Ferguson 1990; Toyama 2015; Kuriyan et al. 2008). Similar issues located in the rhetoric and practice of “participation” are also by now widely disseminated (Cooke and Kothari 2011; Hickey & Mohan 2004). Thus, today’s generation of designers, development practitioners, and academics are aware of the importance of taking context and local perspectives into consideration when designing projects, products, and interventions. However, we argue in this paper that the Information Communication Technologies in Development (ICTD) community’s response to such critiques has manifested in an over-reliance on promoting “local innovation”—and a narrow conceptualization thereof—as the counter-weight to the pitfalls of “foreign technology.” A dichotomy of “local” and “foreign” misses the “already global local”: African consumers and producers of technology already exposed to and operating with technology platforms built in and for the West. Ensuring a technology is customized for the “local” market or context, or built by or with “local” input, misses the complicated global flows of design and technological production—especially the relationship between technologists and their end-users—and raises long-standing feminist and anthropological questions about what it means to know the Other (Trouillot 1991; Bunzl 2004). Dominant narratives about the “local” are unable to account for the broader histories or the situated nature of knowledge (Haraway 1991). We argue that the concept of “local” (and, concomitantly, “global”) should be expanded to transcend essentialized categories and complicate the intersections of subject positions, carving out a space for the existence of “already global local” expertise and production.

Authors

• Leah Horgan, University of California, Irvine

• Angela Crandall Okune, University of California, Irvine