(De)Constructing Bridges for Development and Innovation: Intercultural Concerns Regarding ICT4D

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to offer some critical comments about the collected articles, by introducing a point of view inspired by cultural psychology concerning information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) research issues. This conception of ICTs highlights three fundamental aspects: the role of artifacts in mediating action that are culturally meaningful; the agency of people, and thus their responsibility as social actors; and the need for highly contextualized analysis. In the article, I will read these three points through the lenses of cultural psychology.

Keywords

cultural psychology artifacts agency context

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to offer some critical comments about the collected articles, by introducing a point of view inspired by cultural psychology concerning information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) research issues. In particular, it aims to (1) appreciate researches that deal with intercultural dynamics that inevitably emerge with strength in this special issue, by reporting and sharing notes about situated cases, social actors involved, and (dis)place(ments)/movements/dynamics; (2) stress the importance of including a self-reflective phase in research concerning ICT4D, particularly concerning methodological aspects that intercultural and interdisciplinary challenges pose in this research field.

Cultural psychology takes distance from universalistic or generalist perspectives and concentrates on everyday life activities and events of people within specific communities of practices. From this perspective, culture is conceived as a mediating dispositive (Geertz, 1973, 1994) in the sense that it includes cultural tools that mediate cognitive activities (e.g., language), it gives order and coherence to reality (categorization processes), and it offers moral schemes that can be either legitimated or contested. Furthermore, this theoretical and methodological approach is particularly interested in studying cultural encounters and the different ways of meaning making through communication (Mantovani, 2004).

When analyzing ICT4D research from a sociocultural, historical, and situated approach (Mecacci, 2004; Valsiner & Rosa, 2007; Vygotskij, 1986; Wertsch, 1986, 1991), focus is thus given to the processes triggered by the interaction between social actors and technological artifacts. As stated in the Introduction by Comunello et al. (2020), ICTs are considered as tools or resources through which local communities, groups, and individuals can enhance and promote development and innovation. An intercultural perspective would consider ICTs as cultural tools and resources for mediated action and would integrate the analysis by looking at the dialogical (Bakhtin, 1981) and bidirectional nature between cultures. It would also look at negotiation processes and at clashes, which happen whenever tensions turn into conflicts and whenever some culture is reified above the others. In doing so, such approach considers pivotal the role of identities and local contexts and takes into account existing dynamics and tensions between and within communities, groups, and individuals. ICTs challenge such relations. In this sense, it would be useful to remind that each one of “us”—everyone, and in this specific case, “us” as scholars and researchers—deals with and manifests multiple identities depending on the interaction with the context, and simultaneous belonging to different communities and groups.

Although this Special Issue puts together contributions with very different theoretical and methodological approaches, all of them share a certain vision of ICTs as a resource for action. Technological artifacts, as cultural objects, can be considered in fact as tools for mapping the reality. In this sense, ICTs stimulate access, interaction, and participation (Carpentier, 2015) across communities and different contexts. This conception of ICTs highlights three fundamental aspects: the role of artifacts in mediating action that are culturally meaningful; the agency of people, and thus their responsibility as social actors; and the need for highly contextualized analysis. In the next paragraphs, I will read these three points through the lenses of cultural psychology.

ICTs as a Resource for Action and Cultural (De)Construction

While psychology is often more interested in what is “inside” (e.g., motives, beliefs, processes) and considers knowledge as something confined in the individual mind, the intercultural approach focuses, instead, on the articulation between mind and culture. Thus, for this approach, knowledge is distributed between people, and between people and things (i.e., artifacts). In a well-known example, Bateson clarifies the relation between social actors and their physical and social environment, revealing the two-way kind of such interaction: “If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behavior, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, the man, and so on, round and round” (Bateson, 1972, p. 452). In this sense, artifacts are not only seen as material tools to accomplish an action, they are at the same time intangibles or “ideals” (Cole, 1995; Vygotskij, 1934/1986). According to Cole (1995), cultural artifacts are “ideals” in the sense that they contain—in a codified way—interactions in which they were part of before, and that are now mediating, and are material because they are incorporated in artifacts. From this perspective, every artifact incarnates a project (an “ideal” artifact), while every “ideal” artifact—to exist—needs to have a physical structure. Artifacts are therefore considered to be incarnated human projects (Mantovani, 2007). It is worth noting that the conception of artifacts as an articulation between mind and culture has been recently reconsidered also by socially situated cognition approaches (see Kirshner & Whitson, 1997; Resnick et al., 1991; Smith & Semin, 2004).

Culture itself can be considered as a mediation system or a corpus of artifacts, a set of resources for action in an exchanging space. From intercultural theory and practice (Mantovani, 2000), cultures are permeable boundaries: “Every cultural act lives essentially at the borders and if it is separated from them, it becomes empty and arrogant, degenerates and dies” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 87). The idea of culture as a narrative construction that is “shared, contested and negotiated” (Benhabib, 2002) replaces a closed, static, and asocial vision, with a dynamic, situated, historical, and social one, thus centered on needs and interests of people (Mantovani, 2007). Such conception of culture produces a vision of community that gives space to change, innovation, and individual agency.

This vision of the mind–culture–artifacts nexus, however, has not always been contemplated in ICT4D, whereas most of the time, culture and context have been only conceived as external—although important—variables (Heeks, 2017). Thinking, for instance, about the Personal Trajectory Map from Buskens’s (2020) article, we can observe that ICTs are assumed to play a mediating role between mind and culture. First, ICTs are conceived as a self-management tool, then they are used as an interview and a data analysis guide, while at the second phase of the project, researchers start using them as trainings tool within the research groups. Principles and norms connected with the same artifacts are changing together with artifacts’ different uses, showing the different projects incarnated in ICTs at different stages of the project.

If we accept the dynamic and contested view of culture and artifacts, the idea of innovation that follows requires that the socially constructed set of resources for action are creatively contested. To face new contexts and situations, traditions must be innovated, and artifacts have to be adapted for new purposes. Of course, such actions have to be negotiated together with others both from inside and from outside groups and communities (Mininni, 2000, 2003; Zucchermaglio, 2002, 2003a, 2003b; Zucchermaglio & Alby, 2005). The article regarding drones’ uses for activist journalism (Casagrande, 2020) can be useful to clarify this notion together with the power issues connected with artifacts and their use. Through the study of drone technology and “dronalism,” authors highlighted once again ICTs as mediated practices, and in this case, for activist journalism and mobilization. In this contribution, ICTs are clearly shown as capable of enhancing the visibility of social issues by reporting tensions and conflicts between groups and by getting access into (or above) fields that would be very difficult to reach, observe, and study otherwise. The vision obtained through drones (as well as our experience) is mediated from one side by cognitive and emotional grids that guide the use of it; and from the other side by traces that cultural grids have left in the object. What citizens and journalists can see through drones is a construction that also looks to meet cultural expectations. The history of how drones were conceived reminds us of a militaristic background, and although they can be used in a completely alternative context and for different aims, they do maintain certain proprieties that privilege the observers above others. Indeed, the ones watching from above cannot be seen. Literature (e.g., Argo Panoptes from Greek mythology or George Orwell’s 1984) informs us that whoever holds this capacity holds, in fact, a great invisible power. The use of drones is thus a subversion of power relationships, yet accepting the same logic of looking from above rather than staying at the same level of the communities.

In this sense, and from this perspective, we can affirm that if ICTs are a resource for action, they are also a means for cultural (de)construction.

Social Actors and Identities at the Edge

The second powerful characteristic of ICT4D research, which emerges from the studies collected in this special issue, is its capacity to give voice to a variety of social actors involved. Data inform about how ICTs are challenging attitudes, norms, values, group dynamics, and communities and drives to the question of how and why people decide to get (or not to get) involved into these kinds of projects.

Women, Refugees, Sex Workers, Marginalized Groups, and Vulnerable Communities

By overcoming visions of a “general user”, a situated perspective can help better comprehend how actors (or “consumers”) are in fact embedded in a complex network of relations that play a role in shaping their choices, thus retroacting in the modification of technological objects’ meaning (Cowan, 1987/2012). Furthermore, by giving voice to users, ICT4D research is capable of turning invisibles into visibles and mutes into hearable individuals, groups, and communities. As a result, it gets into private spheres and bridges discourses into public scenarios, therefore enabling analysis and discussion about the multiple identities shown according to the different contexts explored. Indeed, there are some articles in this special issue that are specifically concerned on hearing and sharing different voices from local communities.

For instance, an interesting sociotechnical approach that recognizes the role of endogenous and exogenous actors (Stillman et al., 2020) individuates and distinguishes involved actors at three different levels: landscapes (the highest, exogenous level), sociotechnical regimes (mesolevel), and niches (microlevel). Authors have focused on women as possible innovative niches in three villages in Bangladesh and have examined the role of multilevel dynamics, discourses, and tensions between different voices and actors.

ICTs are clearly a tool for transformation and of personal and social change also for Ineke Buskens (2020). Starting from a participatory action research, the GRACE approach focuses on the resource-based agency for women in countries of Africa and Middle East and considers the role that ICTs may have within disempowered groups that have to “negotiate with the very norms that frame their social lives” (Buskens, 2020, p. 7). The author states that an approach towards women empowerment through the use of ICT can transform sexist and misogynous realities and relationships as well as the cultural, social, political, religious, economic and technological structures that keep such relationships in place. Indeed, this kind of approach could be applied to fight the gender gap and prevent violent behaviors related to (either benevolent or hostile) sexism (see, with this regard, Fasanelli et al., 2020).

Vulnerable communities are in fact engaged in ICT4D and the work of Minestroni and Avio (2020) give voice to vulnerable women workers in the Banaras (now Varanasi) red-light district by using an emic approach. The group-based identities within the red-light district of Shivdaspur show resistance to the ongoing spatial and environmental changes (gentrification) that are affecting the social context, while ICTs seem to offer new possibilities of agency for younger women, triggering an emancipative process that may dis-entrap them from the local and cultural boundaries.

Communities are challenging ICTs in the way that they are shaping, negotiating, and contesting the different uses of it. For instance, old sex workers of Banaras red-light district—as opposed to the younger ones—contest the use of ICTs that youth is doing. They are resistant to change although they recognized the violent and insecure environment in which they live. ICTs become threatening itself because they are not familiar, and they are not acknowledged as useful tools. Instead, old sex workers are engaged in their own way of promoting a social and security cause, working to prevent rapes while “authority” is actually “chasing” them. A sense of injustice is reported here, while they are simultaneously asking for legitimation of their actions as a way of resistance.

What younger sex workers are experiencing with ICT, instead, is a profound transformation of their work and their social lives, which indicates how ICTs—by promoting efficient new ways of communication—are transforming “traditional” works and identities and expanding social borders. In doing so, they are also pushing the borders between legality and illegality and negotiating their identities with the government, the police, clients, and ICTs consumers. This example shows how ICT4D sees firsthand power issues regarding dynamics between social actors that should be further investigated.

Another article that highlights how different identities may be elicited by the use of ICTs is the one regarding refugees in Italy, a group that is often considered as a vulnerable category of migrants and that is often targeted with negative narratives by the mainstream media. This ICT4D research fosters the main agency of this group by reversing its position as recipients of services into reliable interlocutors for the implementation of inclusive initiatives. In this case, ICTs are used as a tool by the participants to connect between members of the community, and by doing so, ICTs contribute to the development of social capital (Modesti et al., 2020). Moreover, once the virtual community has been created, refugees continue to shape ICTs use in order to address specific needs, such as job seeking by sharing employment opportunities.

The article regarding the Dengue Prevention Program (Parra et al., 2020) has the aim of raising community awareness about the disease’s risks and looks to mobilize action at Bañado Sur (Asunción, Paraguay) by using ICT. Within this fieldwork research, actors involved are young volunteers and facilitators who engage in a citizen science project through house visits in an educational context. Less visible in this research—and an element that would have enriched it in terms of voices heard—is the position of people who were supposed to receive the house visits (beneficiaries) that welcomed (or not) volunteers. In fact, according to some volunteers’ statements, we can only imagine that the negotiation process for getting access into the fieldwork was not easy, and that in some cases, it generated tensions and even rejection.

In sum, users clearly emerge from these studies as an active group that contributes for the definition of technology (Pinch & Bijker, 1984) as well as of technologies’ meanings.

Further research when exploring social and cultural processes triggered by ICTs within a community should be dedicated to those not engaged in these kinds of projects, or not willing to use ICTs (i.e., the “nonusers”). Being—as authors well described in the introduction—social actors that resist, reject, exclude, and expel ICTs (Wyatt, 2003), they are also contributing to define “the very meaning of technology” (Comunello et al., 2020).

Contexts and (Dis)Placement of Boundaries

The cultural perspective looks at the (social and physical) context first, and then places the individual in it. Therefore, it is fundamental to situate interactions that take place between communities and ICTs in history and society. As stated in the Introduction of this Special Issue by guest editors, we can consider the entire configuration process as a battlefield where different social groups interact. However, such fields are not only the backgrounds where interactions occur. The context has a crucial role in shaping interactive dynamics. Being able to shift the zoom of research focus at different levels can be useful to better understand such interactions.

Contributions have shown different arenas, continents, countries, regions, and villages where ITD4D is being promoted. Bañados Sur in the Dengue project, or the Banaras red-light district in India, or rural villages in Bangladesh, are not only intercultural fields but pose methodological challenges to “Western academics” and force researchers to reflect on their own positioning to comprehend how they are interacting with participants. Accordingly, ICT4D research must focus its attention on the context-specific resources in terms of sociocultural factors that can produce development and empowerment. As Stillman et al. (2020) remark when referring to niches, local actors can impose structural and cultural constraints or foster the empowerment of niches innovators already present (Shove & Pantzar, 2005).

The vision of globalization as alternated flows between “center” and peripheries” is reductive and ethnocentric because it assumes that everything starts from the center and then returns to it. Instead, relevant exchanges take place between peripheries that flows from many centers toward many peripheries, and vice versa (Appadurai & Breckenridge, 1988). From the intercultural perspective, diversity, instead of homogeneity, is the distinctive character of every vital culture (Mantovani, 2004).

When talking about innovation and development, special attention should be given to local communities that, through ICT, are able and empowered to push sociocultural boundaries by contesting and negotiating their worlds (Benhabib, 2002). Communities can also enhance agency and empowerment by constructing virtual bridges among different places (as in the case of refugees distributed in the Italian territory succeeding to connect through ICT). In this sense, global and local are concepts that leave the floor for transformative communities engaged in sociocultural constructions and deconstructions at the borders.

Regarding communication aspects in these contributions, it is worth noting that ICTs enable the expansion of communicative frontiers, transcending writing and reading in the case of women at Banaras. Illiteracy, a diffused characteristic of vulnerable communities, was not an obstacle for sex workers who chose to communicate in new ways by using video calls to show their bodies and dances. Furthermore, as reported in the article, the use of the ICTs tool in such ways allowed them to gain control (and power) over their relations with clients (or boyfriends).

Constraints and Potentialities of ICT4D

Difficulties on doing ICT4D have been stressed by the authors at different stages of research: from the definition of a theoretical and methodological approach, to the kind of methods and research tools to be used, to the restitution of research results to engaged communities. Field research—and any other kind of research that sees the researcher engaged with participants, such as participatory action research or community-based research—requires first of all the negotiation with informants and gatekeepers to access the field. This, not so simple, step does not concern only the initial phase of a research but the entire research’s lifecycle, and even when access is allowed, it does not mean that will be open to researchers forever. Many of these contributions introduce researchers as “outsiders,” making obvious the difficulties of positioning and addressing researches from the inside. Also, different language and geographical distance have more than once been indicated as problematic factors influencing ICT4D projects.

ICT4D research included in this special issue has dedicated particular attention to women, considering them as a minority, disempowered, or vulnerable group. That may be because religious laws and norms in many traditional communities do not concede to women equal rights as for men. In this sense, it is fundamental to better understand the position and point of view of women toward their own local communities. As Parekh (1999) stresses, women’s own perception has to be better explored, because if they do not agree with—for instance—a feminist approach, it would be wrong to say that they are victims of a false consciousness culturally generated and that they need to be liberated by “well-intended strangers.”

With this concern, interculturality differentiates from a pure relativistic approach, in the sense that, instead of accepting every discourse, proposal, or practice as a manifestation of human diversity, it assumes tensions in the quest for “truth”—taking into account that we have access to such truth with our own tools, grids, categories, and practices that are a product of a certain historical and cultural environment. From an ethical and political perspective, interculturality refuses a moral passivity and political acquiescence, and while it unceasingly looks for the “truth,” it also looks for the right causes to defend, without forgetting the risks of certain positions that may conduct us again to ethnocentric positions toward “universal values” whereas our critical sense is preserved when reminding that ours is a peculiar, situated, and culturally mediated way of seeing “universal values” (Mantovani, 2004). I think that, when doing ICT4D projects, this is an important risk to acknowledge and to reflect on if we ought to incorporate an intercultural perspective.

Another issue that emerges from the above-mentioned projects, although not always explored, concerns their duration and (the need of including) follow-ups after the intervention. It might be important to include in projects regarding ICT4D the assessment of the interventions’ sustainability by developing and using accountable methods and tools.

As for its potentialities, these projects have shown how ICT4D is capable of empowering social actors by considering them not only users but also active producers of innovation through community-based interventions. As Verhaegh et al. (2016) stated, innovation emerges in a complex network of different agencies, or hybrid collective; and an intercultural approach allows to focus on such dimensions. At the same time, projects have shown the potentiality of ICT4D in terms of transformative and creative power triggered in local communities.

As reported by Comunello et al. (2020), “ICT4D as a research field is an ideal interdisciplinary and intercultural environment.” Indeed, when talking about disciplines, we often address them as different cultures with different languages, vocabularies, and shared knowledge and meaning-making processes within certain communities of practice. Furthermore, multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity have different meanings in literature, the latter regarding a transformative process that transcend, transgress, and transform focusing on the relationship between science and society through a high degree of collaboration between disciplines. Following this definition, many of the ICT4D projects reported here may be considered (if not explicitly declared) as transdisciplinary projects.

The intercultural complexity of many researches is well underlined—although deserves further attention—on the self-reflexive insights of researchers. Ethnomethodology could be useful in these kind of projects as well as insider research and auto-ethnographic tools. Moreover, discourse analysis of social actors involved (and of nonusers as well) could be implemented to collect and analyze as many voices as possible from the local communities, thus unveiling identities and power issues.

Interestingly, O’Mara and Harris (2016) refer to the pedagogical elements of ICTs and promoting ICT4D in educational sectors, stating that “creative ICTs use as not merely a tool but a contested, negotiated space in which young participants shape educational transits of being and becoming, and arts-based digital learning as twenty-first century global pedagogies.”

Constructing and Deconstructing Categories

We may conclude that we need to bridge boundaries if we want to promote innovation, development, well-being, and sustainability because they can only emerge from hybriding, contaminating, and contesting rigid categories, and such processes take place whenever we interact with different positions (i.e., contexts, disciplines, cultures). If innovation means the action of and the process of changing paradigms, applying new methods, ideas, or products by transforming, changing, and creating, then this also means a (de)construction process of sociocultural issues that characterized every human being. In this sense, interculturality can offer an important contribution to ICT4D by blurring or approaching ICTs and development research, as the authors call for in the introduction of this Special Issue.

From an intercultural perspective as well as from ICT4D approach, we study “real” social environments where people live their everyday lives, environments that are always specific, historically and culturally defined, in some way always “new.” Research is done not on people but with people. It intends to deal with new problems that may offer new and open categories, instead of reducing it to already known processes. Intercultural research is original and critical: it argues with the researcher about its own resources and its positionality. Reflexivity becomes a central criterion to acknowledge and explicit the researcher’s responsibility (Mantovani, 2003).

Articles presented here have shown great proximity to the intercultural approach and some of them share the same vision about the importance of understanding the cultural (de)construction that takes place when using ICTs for certain scopes, aims, needs, interests, and actions by sharing, negotiating, and contesting meanings between communities, groups, and individuals.

Also, the variety of different backgrounds from which scholars and practitioners are doing ICT4D gives the opportunity of promoting inter- and transdisciplinarity in this field, in which psychology is providing a systemic vision around the nexus between communities and individuals. More specifically, and following Mantovani, a situated approach to technology offered by cultural psychology would further enrich ICT4D while exploring the relations and mediated actions at individual and sociocultural levels, therefore promoting a win–win relation.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Laura S. Norton is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Communication and Social Research of Sapienza University of Rome. She holds a PhD in Social Psychology. Her research interests concern internationalization and sustainability at Higher Education Institutions, interdisciplinarity, migration issues and interculturality.

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