Poggiali, Lisa

LISA POGGIALI, then a student at Stanford University, Stanford, California, received a grant in May 2010 to aid research on 'Testimony and Texting: Mobile Phone Technology and Emergent 'Publics' in Contemporary Kenya,' supervised by Dr. Sylvia Yanagisako. Twelve months of ethnographic research in Nairobi, Kenya was undertaken with the following populations: developers in the 'Information and Communications Technologies ('ITC') community; residents of the informal settlement of Mathare, who were trained in digital cartography skills by a NGO that aimed to map the neighborhood; and governmental and non-governmental figures who engaged with digital mapping and/or urban planning in Nairobi's informal settlements. Both the epistemological underpinnings of the technical work of writing code and designing software, and the social and political effects of the technology in non-technical settings was examined and analyzed. Significant findings include the following: 1) technical activities such as writing code and designing software are culturally situated practices connected to local understandings of political patronage and corruption, labor markets, and consumption patterns, despite the fact that developers often described their work as 'value-free;' and 2) concepts such as 'transparency' and 'accountability' were regularly mobilized by disparate groups of informants to explain the benefits of digital mapping, but the meaning of these terms was dependent upon the identity of the speaker and the discursive context. This resulted in different understandings of the underlying ethics and politics at stake in digital mapping projects, and different barometers for measuring the 'success' of related projects.