Response to - The Dead Hand of (Western) Academe: Community Informatics in a Less Developed Country Context June 9, 2011
I always appreciate Mike Gurstein's posts, and this one was even closer to my heart than usual. It explores something which I struggle to understand - and which he, as an academic, clearly explains.
(Note on abbreviations: DCs = Developed Countries, LDC = Less Developed Countries, ICT = Information and Communication Technology, D=Development)
As a practitioner I have often been bewildered by the apparent chasm between the work of most ICT4D academics and the reality on the ground. I look at ICTD research. I look at the reality of the people I know. The people I know use ICT (how else would we be communicating with each other?) and they are active in community development. It seems we should have genuinely overlapping interests, but I have almost given up looking. I usually search ICTD research in vain for relevance, for some connection points with my community development friends.
It grieves me when I look at ICTD academic publications that in theory relate to my practical world - and in fact don't come anywhere close. It strikes me as a tragic waste of all that brain power - all the information gathering, 'thinking time", analysis and presentation of results. It seems particularly ironic to see that lack of connection and communication in a discipline that is nominally about Information and Communication. I wish that academic talent and time could be applied to things that I care about. I want to do my practical work, (online and in Africa) informed by relevant theory. I'd also appreciate studies of the practical work of others. I want to share the fruits of academic study with all my contacts on the ground. I struggle to understand how the people who are committed to studying ICTD seem so separate from the grass roots.
No wonder then that I appreciated Mike's post on "The Dead Hand of (Western) Academe: Community Informatics in a Less Developed Country Context" especially this part:
In the area (of) --Community Informatics—community-based use of ICTs, those with Computer or Information or Social Science backgrounds aren’t for the most part equipped to support activities on the ground enabling local development with ICTs.
The issues are too broad—involving an understanding and sensitivity (and not incidentally research skills) that can accommodate both technical and social issues; the questions at least the technical ones are too trivial and mundane to be of academic interest in DC (Developed country) institutions; and yet those are the ones that need to be addressed on the ground if there is to be effective use of ICTs in the LDC. The type of engagement required with these issues is a practical and boots-dirtying effort whereas academe in the DC creates the expectation of pristine labs, mathematical formulations, and computer simulations as an ultimate goal.
And so, the questions that I was asked to address as I entered into discussions with my colleagues in the LDCs was how could they retrain themselves from their level of extreme specialization, abstraction, and narrowness into a path which would allow them to directly engage with the real issues that surrounded them. That was their interest in Community Informatics—it was the focus on identifying and responding to real problems on the ground, working towards solutions in a pragmatic and discipline neutral way, engaging with practice and practitioners and the dilemmas of local policy rather than attempting to maintain a false face of place independent, neutrality and disinterest.
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Posted on June 9, 2011 by Michael Gurstein
I’m just back from a variety of recent travels–lecturing, workshopping, seminaring, meeting with academics and researchers in various parts of the Asian less developed countries (LDCs). Specifically I was invited to discuss community informatics with academics/researchers in 3 universities in 3 rather different regions of Asia.
In reflecting on these meetings I realized the very strong strain of consistency in our discussions. In each instance, the academics, almost all of whom had recent Ph.D.s from research universities in Developed Countries (DC’s) returned home to find that their recently acquired skills and areas of expert knowledge were of little direct value in their home environments.
A consistent theme that emerged from my discussions was confusion and frustration that many of these colleagues expressed at trying to fit the dead hand of their received discipline based knowledge and training into the urgent vibrancy of the requirements for their skills and engagement in the world just outside their doors.
How exactly could these recent Social Science and IT/computer science Ph.D.s shoehorn their hyper-specialized, theory and methodology oriented, super advanced technology focused and platformed research and instruction into the much more rural, problem-based, and people-centred issues towards which they were being urged (by their governments, university administrations, and personal consciences) to respond.