The Shape of ICT4D to Come: Future Perspectives on Digital Development

Pre-ICIS SIG GlobDev Workshop, Bangkok, 15 December 2024

Chairs: Silvia Masiero, Jolanta Kowal

About the Workshop

This workshop is organized by SIG GLOBDEV under the Association for Information Systems (AIS). This is where papers from the Global Development workshops at ICIS and ECIS and Track at AMCIS are fast-tracked. This journal is also open to all the AIS SIGs. For more information, visit the SIG GLOBDEV Research page.

Call for Papers

The field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) can be described as being at a historical juncture. With a “date of birth” positioned by researchers in the 1980s, and early studies on computers in low- and middle-income countries dating back to the 1960s (Heeks, 2014), the field developed around the idea that the question on whether ICTs could participate to development processes was solved with a clear yes (Walsham & Sahay, 2006). Corroborated by investigations of the meaning of “development” in ICT4D (Zheng et al., 2018), the field grew along the fundamental assumptions that “development” is to be pursued, and that ICT could, in many interlocking ways, act as an enabler of it, being inscribed in national development policies and in the global agenda embodied by the Sustainable Development Goals (Andersson & Hatakka, 2023).

The last decades have, however, casted multiple shades on this perspective. As reflected in the notion of adverse digital incorporation (Heeks, 2022), studies from multiple fields have displayed a common argument: ICTs can, beyond the development orthodoxy associated to them, be implicated in outcomes that are not only unjust, but can be outright harmful for the very people they are supposed to benefit. Technologies of food distribution, aimed at supporting social protection programmes, have resulted into exclusionary outcomes that have even been associated to hunger deaths (Khera, 2019; Singh, 2019). Biometric systems, aimed to identify asylum seekers, have been made interoperable with police authority databases with repressive powers (Martins et al., 2022). Surveillance technologies with logics of “security” have resulted in violent forms of policing, such as the surveillance of women’s clothing in Iran (Akbari, 2021) and the design of AI applications for border externalization in the EU (EuroMed Rights, 2023). All these perspectives, drawn from empirical research, seriously dispute the very idea of an ICT “for” development, leaving open questions on the future of the field and on the legitimacy of its original assumptions (Masiero, 2024; Akbari & Masiero, 2023).

It is at this historical juncture that we launch this call for papers. Motivated by awareness of the interface position of the ICT4D field, between a past of positive assumptions and a present of at least partially adverse digital incorporation, we invite papers that concur, in many ways, to building the shape of ICT4D to come, that is, the future of our field. These can be theoretical contributions making sense of the field, or empirical contributions centred on research objects that the ICT4D of the present days needs to confront. Possible topics are of a wide span, especially given the increasing need for ICT4D to interface with different disciplines (Akbari & Masiero, 2023). Topics include, but are not limited to:

Full papers (max. 12 pages) and research-in-progress papers (max. 7 pages) should be submitted via EasyChair by 30 September 2024. Papers should use the SIGGlobDev workshop template, and be fully anonymised for submission.

Workshop site: https://sigglobdev.github.io/ict-global-development/

The submission Web page for Pre-ICIS SIG GlobDev Workshop, Bangkok, 15 December 2024 is https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icisglobdev2024

Template for the workshop is here: Workshop Template

Important Dates

Contact Information

For more details, contact:

Silvia Masiero: silvima@ifi.uio.no

Jolanta Kowal: jolanta.kowal@uwr.edu.pl

References