More information on this project on the Telecentres and Mobiles website.
Fotohistórias: vidas en la frontera, en EEUU y en el territorio (Photostories: lives at the border, in the US and back in the territory). Intervention at Luis Fernando Barón’s class “Laboratorio Migrantes, Tecno-Medios y Cambio Social” (Migrants, Technologies and Social Change), Master in Periodismo (Journalism), Universidad ICESI, Cali, Colombia, 5 May 2015.
More on the project: http://fotohistorias.ischool.uw.edu
|
This paper explores the possibility for a design-based research (DBR) methodology in the broader ICT-for-development (ICT4D) domain. Specifically, the authors reflect on the application of DBR within a local development project, active in Mozambique, titled RE-ACT. This paper will reflect on a design-based research strategy in terms of RE-ACT, and will explore its opportunities, both for the respective research outcomes and for the discipline of ICT4D. The authors note the distinctive advantages of DBR, but conclude that the social impacts of the methodology are elusive. |
from Sara Vannini Final dissemination workshop of the project RE-ACT (social REpresentations of community multimedia centres and ACTions for improvement). |
My PhD Defense “Social Representations of Community Multimedia Centres in Mozambique”, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) Lugano, Switzerland, 6 June 2014.
UNESCO Community Multimedia Centres are a specific model of public access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). These venues are conceived to address the information needs of underserved and marginalised communities in emerging and developing countries. They are composed of a community radio station, which broadcasts in local languages and is managed by local people, along with a telecentre, a place where people can access computers, the Internet, and other services such as offline content collections, photocopier and fax. The model was designed as an ICT for development (ICT4D) initiative, aimed to bridge the digital and knowledge divides experienced within remote communities.
Community Multimedia Centres (CMCs) can be defined as a top-down, off-the-shelf solution, designed on communities’ behalf and replicated in a variety of countries. This one-size-fits-all kind of intervention has characterised most of the first wave of ICT4D projects, and was, in later time, criticised in favour of more participatory approaches. Top-down approaches are believed to originate mismatches between design assumptions and observed realities. Yet, CMCs and analogous public access to ICT projects, still receive considerable attention within the field, and huge investments are still made by governments and international organizations to support and create them.
Purpose
This research explores the phenomenon of CMCs in Mozambique by investigating Social Representations (Moscovici, 1961) that different stakeholders’ have of them. Social Representations can provide an integrated view of CMCs that give voice to local perspectives without neglecting to take into account the initiating agencies’ expectations. Social Representation theory is, thus, proposed as a suitable theoretical framework to operationalize the gaps between designs and realities that too often affect ICT4D project sustainability.
Methods
This research was conducted by using a mixed methods approach. CMCs of 10 Mozambican provinces were investigated by conducting 232 interviews with representatives of initiating agencies, local staff members, CMC users (both the radio and telecenter components), users of the community radio only, and community members who did not use the CMCs. Photo-elicitation was also used, which is an underexplored technique in ICT4D, and was employed for data generation with members of the staff and CMC users. Following the analysis of transcribed interviews, different data analysis methods were employed on both the visual and the discursive data generated, including co-occurrences of the lemmas used by interviewees and inductive and deductive content analyses. The combination of these different techniques allowed to gain in-depth insights and to triangulate research outcomes. Outcomes of the analyses are presented in three journal articles included in this work.
Furthermore, a systematic literature review on the use of Social Representations Theory in ICT4D and adjacent domains was performed, which sheds light on the potential that the theory has for the field.
Outcomes and Implications
This work makes a case for approaches that include contextual realities and local actors in the design of ICT4D interventions, and validates Social Representations as a suitable theory in the field. Also, it proposes a viable methodological strategy able to grab the complexity of the local context. Overall, the theoretical and methodological frameworks employed generated valuable outcomes, which confirm and increase the literature about public access to ICT venues. Outcomes from this work will inform academics, as well as practitioners and policy makers about the way CMCs are accommodated into different social actors’ universes of meanings and practices, and about meaningful improvements to be enacted into the local context.
|
On the cutting-edge scene for several years, and recently overtaken by the diffusion of more personal and pervasive technologies, telecentres have attracted and are still luring the interests of Governments in developing regions. To individuate improvement strategies and give food for thoughts to researchers and practitioners in the area, this study presents an in-depth qualitative analysis of the reasons why local people in Mozambique do not access the telecentre component of their local Community Multimedia Centers (CMCs). Based on 229 semi-structured interviews, the analysis allows to depict four main clusters of reasons for non-use, to finally suggest how they can be overcome. |
This panel engages with these issues, focusing on methodologies for community-based research that share a concern for understanding community views and visions. Three data gathering methods are explored, and examples are given of their application within three international research projects in Syria, Mozambique, and South Africa. The comparison and discussion over these cases aims to examine the impact of methodological choices on the outcomes of community-based research, clarifying implications for two complementary, yet distinctive, purposes: 1) generating genuine community meanings and understandings; and 2) informing design of relevant community information systems and communication artifacts. |
|
Formal & Informal Learning practices in Community Multimedia Centres in Mozambique. An exploratory study. from Sara Vannini
This article wants to investigate the point of view of the local communities where these centres operate, that are at the same time beneficiaries and providers of formal and informal educational activities, since CMCs staff members belong to the same communities they serve. The intention of |
This paper investigates different stakeholders perceptions of the most widespread kind of venues to publicly access ICTs in Mozambique: Community Multimedia Centres. By rooting in the social psychology theory of Social Representations, this study analyzes autodriven photo-elicited interviews (n=103), to users (n=55) and staff members (n=48), across 10 locations within the country. Photo-elicited interviews are explored through photo-taxonomy and qualitative thematic analysis, aided by the Nvivo 9.2 content analysis software. The paper suggests how this data collection technique encouraged interviewees to reflect about what a CMC is and what it should be, while providing important insights about users’ and staff members’ ideas, values and practices about these venues. |
|
Community Multimedia Centres are considered by initiating agencies as instruments able to inform, entertain and educate the population, as well as to give them voice into the knowledge society and to enable them to have a larger impact on public issues. As part of a bigger research and development project aiming to unveil how local communities, instead, perceive them, this paper qualitatively analyzed a corpus of 235 local people’s statements regarding inbound, out-bound and shared information and communication flows connected to Community Multimedia Centres in Mozambique. |
Visual methodologies are widely diffused in social sciences, but they have rarely been considered within ICT4D researches. |
|
Presentation at TASCHA talk, 9 August 2012, UW, Seattle, WA. |
For the class “Tecnologie Digitali per le istituzioni pubbliche e no profit” (Bachelor), USI. |
|
Presented at PhD course “Academic Teaching”, USI, Lugano, Switzerland, December 2011. |