Suchergebnisse

In Networking Peripheries, Anita Chan shows how digital cultures flourish beyond Silicon Valley and other celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The evolving digital cultures in the Global South vividly demonstrate that there are more ways than one to imagine what digital practice and global connection could look like. To explore these alternative developments, Chan investigates the diverse initiatives being undertaken to "network" the nation in contemporary Peru, from attempts to promote the intellectual property of indigenous artisans to the national distribution of digital education technologies to open technology activism in rural and urban zones. Drawing on ethnographic accounts from government planners, regional free-software advocates, traditional artisans, rural educators, and others, Chan demonstrates how such developments unsettle dominant conceptions of information classes and innovations zones. Government efforts to turn rural artisans into a new creative class progress alongside technology activists' efforts to promote indigenous rights through information tactics; plans pressing for the state wide adoption of open source--based technologies advance while the One Laptop Per Child initiative aims to network rural classrooms by distributing laptops. As these cases show, the digital cultures and network politics emerging on the periphery do more than replicate the technological future imagined as universal from the center.

Labour NGOs have played a role, especially in southern China, in raising Chinese workers' consciousness. This paper takes a historical perspective and argues that the relationship between labour NGOs and workers has changed in the past three decades, from one of workers' dependency on Chinese labour NGOs and these NGOs' dependency, in turn, on foreign NGOs in an asymmetrical relationship, to one more of partnership. More recently, some groups of workers have become cognisant of a divergence of interests between themselves and NGO advisors. The evolving relationship is analysed against the backdrop of an authoritarian political regime that necessitates all the actors to strategise in complex ways. A coordinated wave of strikes and other collective actions at Chinese Walmart stores in 2016 provides a case study.