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Cultural appropriation: information technologies as sites of transnational imagination

Published: 11 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The diverse ways in which technologies are modified and appropriated into local contexts are an important theme in CSCW research. Today, translocal processes such as the formation of international corporations and the movement of people and ideas across nation states increasingly shape these local contexts of technology use and design. We draw from prior work on appropriation in CSCW and meld it with work from transnational studies to illustrate appropriation as a cultural phenomenon and as it unfolds in relation to emerging translocal processes. We ground our explorations in findings from ethnographic research on collaborations and exchange among IT professionals in urban China. This work makes two main contributions. First, it expands CSCW's focus on socio-technical systems by taking seriously socio-political and socio-economic processes. Second, it contributes to debates on cross-cultural and global technological development by employing transnational imagination as an analytical tool.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
    February 2012
    1460 pages
    ISBN:9781450310864
    DOI:10.1145/2145204
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    Published: 11 February 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. cultural appropriation
    2. globalization
    3. imagination
    4. multi-sited ethnography
    5. politics
    6. transnational

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    February 11 - 15, 2012
    Washington, Seattle, USA

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    CSCW '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 164 of 415 submissions, 40%;
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    • (2024)Air/time Travel: Rethinking Appropriation in Global HCI and Futures of Electronic ExchangeProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642590(1-21)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)Exploring Value Proposition by Indigenous Entrepreneurs: Multiple Case Studies of Powerloom Enterprises of Manipur With Reference to Grassroots Innovation and Frugal AspectsSocial Enterprise Values and Processes10.1007/978-981-97-3252-4_5(107-125)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2024
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