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Women and the Spatial Politics of Community Networks: Invisible in the sociotechnical imaginary of wireless connectivity

Published: 10 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Community Networks (CNs) offer many positive impacts for rural inhabitants of low-income regions beyond cheap communications, including different benefits to local economies, social welfare and personal well-being. However, spatial politics compromise diverse inclusion in these benefits by rendering women invisible when the wireless technologies used by CNs are designed, deployed and referred to in discussions about regulation. I support this claim by drawing together insights from multiple case research of rural CNs in India, Indonesia, Argentina Mexico, South Africa and Uganda, and my engagement with activists advocating for CNs. The spatial politics shaping debates about spectrum regulation, and the wireless technologies to which they apply, are at different scales than women in rural villages experience. Gendered spatial politics perform orthogonally across all scales and dimensions to constrain women's proximal access to WiFi, capacity to learn about and undertake technical tasks and involvement in decisions about CNs; however, advocacy for CNs works across vast geographies.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
OzCHI '19: Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction
December 2019
631 pages
ISBN:9781450376969
DOI:10.1145/3369457
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • HFESA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia Inc.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 January 2020

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Author Tags

  1. Community Networks
  2. Gender
  3. Regulation
  4. Spatial Politics
  5. WiFi

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  • Refereed limited

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OZCHI'19
OZCHI'19: 31ST AUSTRALIAN CONFERENCE ON HUMAN-COMPUTER-INTERACTION
December 2 - 5, 2019
WA, Fremantle, Australia

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  • (2024)Commoning as a Strategy for HCI Research and Design in South AsiaProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642547(1-18)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Seam Work and Simulacra of Societal Impact in Networking Research: A Critical Technical Practice ApproachProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642337(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2022)Community networks as models to address connectivity gaps in underserved communitiesInformation Development10.1177/0266666922108965839:3(524-538)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2022
  • (2022)Situating Network Infrastructure with People, Practices, and Beyond: A Community Building WorkshopCompanion Publication of the 2022 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3500868.3560716(267-272)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2022
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  • (2022)Land, Letṧema and Leola: Digital Transformation on a Rural Community’s Own TermsInnovation Practices for Digital Transformation in the Global South10.1007/978-3-031-12825-7_4(59-78)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2022
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  • (2021)Rural UncommoningACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/344579328:3(1-50)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2021
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