Smart Futures

• What visions of (agricultural) development for rural Africa are mediated through mobile information services?

• How do mobile services translate probabilistic futures into anticipatory instructions by linking scientists, IT specialists, development practitioners and users?

• How do mobile services transform the way users perceive and act on nature by mediating a specific kind of information and guidance, and thus transform human-nature relations more generally?

• Document analysis
• Event ethnography on agricultural fairs and conferences
• Participant observation of NGOs and farmers involved in diverse agricultural development projects

Following our document analysis and the ethnography of some large conferences that brought together practitioners and decision-makers from research institutions, government and non-government agencies and the private sector, it became clear that the current visions about ICT4D and Data4D are primarily based on what is considered as universal expert knowledge. It is characterized by a vision of technological solutionism for development problems, in combination with a strongly entrepreneurial rhetoric. Here, political, economic and social challenges are presented as technical. This way, knowledge is removed from its context: As apparently neutral, technologically collected and processed, information is to be conveyed to the rural population of the Global South to foster development.

Our empirical research, however, put emphasis on the complex coming-together of these visions and respective programs and the local settings and interests (Matejcek & Verne 2021, Matejcek & Verne, accepted, Matejcek et al. submitted). Here it becomes apparent that technical knowledge and information gained through digital technologies is considered more important and objective, and therefore rather superior to local forms of knowledge, with the idea that these technologies may help to overcome the perceived knowledge gap. However, as our insights gained through participant observation in projects disseminating agricultural advisory information show, the encounters between development practitioners taking their visions to the fields and local farmers are hardly as straightforward but rather lead to a hybridization of knowledge, including complex processes of negotiation or even neglect. Focusing on the ways in which different actors interact with technologies, how they translate probabilistic futures into anticipatory instructions, and what role they play both in project’s agendas and context-dependent practices, we found that the new actors and their visions have considerably changed the mechanisms through which agricultural futures should be realized. Key issues, in this regard, are the processes of datafication, gamification and experimentation which form the basis of the two PhD theses which are currently in their writing stage (working titles of PhD theses: “Experiment rural development: Testing Digital Technologies in Southern Tanzania” [Matejcek], “Technologies of Anticipation: Agriculture, Digitalization, and Human-Environment Relations in Kenya” [Rochlitz]).

2018

Event ethnographies at fairs and conferences for ICT4Ag practitioners, Exploration of potential case studies, Document analysis; Reading Seminar “Posthumanist Salon”

2019

Ethnographic field research with NGOs and farmers in Kenya and Tanzania, Organization of international Workshop on “Digitized Natures”

2020

Empirical Analysis, Organization of the Annual Meeting of New Cultural Geography in Bonn “Technoscapes & Technocultures”

2021

Publications and thesis writing