Doctoral candidate Lisa Poggiali, supervised by Dr. Sylvia Yanagisako, will undertake anthropological research on 'digital testimony,' first-person accounts of troubling events that are publicly circulated via cell phone text messages. As the first full length ethnographic study to examine the convergence of mobile phone technology and practices of testimony, this research will investigate the role of mobile phone technology in narrative practice, and the forms of political participation and social formation that such practice makes possible.
The research will be carried out in Nairobi, Kenya. Kenya is currently the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world, and preliminary research reveals that a significant number of Kenyans are using this technology. Further, many developers in Kenya's burgeoning technology sector believe that these digitally transmitted testimonials have politically transformative effects. In 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the researcher will analyze the production and distribution of digital testimony, and evaluate its potential to create new forms of political participation and social formation in contemporary Kenya. Her research will focus on the following questions: Is the production and distribution of testimony through mobile phone technology constituting an emergent witnessing public in contemporary Kenya, as developers claim? If so, who constitutes this public, how is it being produced, and to what political and social effects?
The researcher will answer these questions by examining the discourses and practices of three populations: 1) the developers or the technologically minded activists who are developing the mobile phone platforms that enable Kenyans to send digital testimony; 2) the users who are the audience to whom developers address their technical expertise; and 3) state institutions such as the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology. In the tradition of sustained ethnographic fieldwork, research methods will include institutional ethnography, participant observation, content analysis, and interviews.
The research is important because although Africa is a site of burgeoning technological innovation, it has thus far been marginalized in scholarly discussions of technology. By examining the interactive relationship between new technologies and their social and cultural contexts, findings from this project will help to correct this imbalance in knowledge distribution. In addition, this research will contribute to a deeper understanding of relations between the contemporary state and the public sphere in Africa and beyond. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.
Over the past five years, Kenya has become a major site for technological innovation worldwide, drawing attention from technologists working both within Africa and abroad. This ethnographic project, carried out over twenty months of fieldwork in Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi, examines the burgeoning phenomenon of digital mapping, one of the most locally celebrated forms of digital technology. Through mapping, Kenyans are using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to create spatialized digital archives of their country. Digital maps are championed by an unusual cross-section of Kenyan society; "techies," non-governmental organizations [NGO], civil servants, politicians, and the urban poor alike use them to chart everything from the location of restaurants and shopping areas to incidences of political violence and government neglect. Almost all express that "putting Kenya on the global map," as one developer put it, is instrumental to Kenya’s successful development, a means to a more democratic, economically prosperous, and politically transparent nation. Through interviews, surveys, and participant observation with the aforementioned actors, this project focuses on both the production and uses of these technologies. It elucidates how digital technologies are fully entangled with political, social, and material processes, such as the formation of a new social class of technical elites in Kenya, and a refashioned governmental discourse on accountability and development. It also analyzes the competing claims these actors make about digital maps in order to parse out the shifting meanings of key related concepts, such as democracy and transparency. By denaturalizing such concepts, we come to a richer understanding of the social and political effects of these new technologies. This ethnographic research, which will result in a doctoral dissertation, hopes to productively contribute to scholarship on technology in Africa. While the continent, with Kenya at its forefront, is a site of great technological innovation, it has thus far been marginalized in scholarly discussions of technology. This project helps rectify this imbalance in knowledge distribution.
