Prof. Itty Abraham, National University of Singapore on Friday, changed the title to Technology and the Political: Confrontation and Recognition. He put Rohingya study in the STS (science Technology and Society Frame toward the end of his lecture.. see https://youtube.com/embed/YhTy_vjeB6U?start=2394&end=2877
Main points in ppt:
Broad Technopolitical Vectors
-Older STS traditions: technology as a condition of modernity leading to dystopia, but also as liberator (household technologies, vaccines..
From Politics to Technology – Inserting political values into the technological system
From Technology to Politics – ie manipulation of politics using technology or the absence of it.. Inserting the technological into the political field.
Opening up the Political Field..
Going beyond political binaries – reinforcing inequalities v/s offering new tools for taking back control
Toward a Global STS : technosciences emergent from the informal sectors of gloabal cities like kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, Nairobi, Mexico city...
The other byte that may interest us were in response to questions by Sujatha Raman on radical democracy and Anushree Gupta in the Webinar.. he explained his suggestion was a Global STS saying that STS has mainly been seen as an anti-western stream, a post colonial science and that he would like to posit Global STS as an attempt to expand STS boundaries to include other locations of discourse. He gives the example of Informal Mumbai, where waste is a resource in the people, machine, environment spectrum, or situations where existing life is precarious and therefore risk analysis of technological intervention is marginalised.. or what he calls “contact zones” between heterogenous people, ideas, technologies, are the starting point of discourse.. https://youtube.com/embed/YhTy_vjeB6U?start=5113&end=5529
At KICS we have been talking about this in different ways.. but perhaps someone would like to lead a discussion in one of our “third-Saturday-sharings” ie STS on TSS?
The bulk of the lecture spoke about how the Rohingya Diaspora/Refugess have use the Spectacle Football , Rohingya TV as well as use Block Chain technology for refugee ID purposes. The close association of social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter) with the so-called “Arab Spring” popular movements has reinforced our collective understanding of new media technologies as a great political disruptor. Under some circumstances, digital media can become a force multiplier for an unarmed public against a repressive state. Such a politics of confrontation should be seen as a tactical use of technology, facing certain inherent limits. Political technologies can be strategic as well, however, going far beyond the direct encounter of a movement and state to threaten state legitimacy, as this case study will discuss. My examination of a KL-based Rohingya diaspora group explores the long-term strategic implications of what I call the politics of recognition through discussion of two techno-political moments – the group’s negotiations with the Unicode Consortium to make the Rohingya script visible on electronic screens and efforts to use blockchain to create a transnational refugee database.