Fabricating Silicon Savannah

This book provides a comprehensive overview of technology start-up arenas in Nairobi and examines their global place. These start-ups are popularly perceived as representing future prosperity that is incorporated in the present. The author examines how developing country arenas lay bare the power asymmetries and taken-for-granted assumptions that determine which technoscientific imaginaries become globalized and universal, and are supported by legitimizing narratives, logics and institutions. A framing of 'catch-up' or 'leapfrogging' for technoscientific development that is based on capitalist modernity is regarded as incontrovertibleso much so that alternative values and approaches to technology production are rarely contemplated. This book documents how actors in Nairobi's startup arena relate to these imaginaries and the affects, enactments and places that they produce.

A comprehensive overview of technology start-up arenas in Nairobi Investigates assumptions about sites of the production of commercialization of digital technologies Advances the discourse on globalisation and how universalism and plurarity co-exist

Autorentext

Dr. Michel Wahome's research examines technoscientific production in conditions of global power geometry, specifically in African settings. A thematic thread through her work is the effect of place and standpoint on knowledge production.

Klappentext

This book provides a comprehensive overview of technology start-up arenas in Nairobi and examines their global place. These start-ups are popularly perceived as representing future prosperity that is incorporated in the present. The author examines how developing country arenas lay bare the power asymmetries and taken-for-granted assumptions that determine which technoscientific imaginaries become globalized and universal, and are supported by legitimizing narratives, logics and institutions. A framing of 'catch-up' or 'leapfrogging' for technoscientific development that is based on capitalist modernity is regarded as incontrovertible-so much so that alternative values and approaches to technology production are rarely contemplated. This book documents how actors in Nairobi's startup arena relate to these imaginaries and the affects, enactments and places that they produce.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. Arenas of Development.- 3. Archetypes of Agency and Constraint.- 4. Developmentalism and Telecommunications Policy and Governance.- 5. Arenas of Fabrication.- 6. Including Users.- 7. Alternative and Reparative Futures.- 8. Analysing Arenas of Development.