Enhanced deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is considered as a major factor in eliminating vestiges of feudal social organization and hierarchies in rural Asia, and a techno-development paradigm of social change inherited from the industrial era is envisioned. South Asia has particularly witnessed massive proliferation of civil-society-based development initiatives to demonstrate ICTs’ potential to provide unprecedented social and economic opportunities for vulnerable groups such as women and marginalized communities. Social exclusion is often understood as a matter of lack of awareness and inappropriate project design, and incorporation of gender concerns ‘from the very beginning of the project design’ is suggested as a more or less universal solution for enhancing participation. This article challenges this conventional wisdom and argues that civil society’s engagement with ICTs has not been successful in bridging the social divides it attempted to address. The patterns of ICTs’ deployment and control in the rural setting tend to reinforce existing social divides and, in certain cases, create new divides. The participation of women and the underprivileged in these projects is abysmally low and this is in striking contrast to the projected image of these initiatives as being overtly sensitive to issues of gender and social divisions. The article argues that the question of inclusion is better understood when addressed as a matter of structure rather choice.
Hegemonic Open Science, emergent from the circuits of knowledge production in the Global North and serving the economic interests of platform capitalism, systematically erase the voices of the subaltern margins from the Global South and the Southern margins inhabiting the North. Framed within an overarching emancipatory narrative of creating access for and empowering the margins through data exchanged on the global free market, hegemonic Open Science processes co-opt and erase Southern epistemologies, working to create and reproduce new enclosures of extraction that serve data colonialism-capitalism. In this essay, drawing on our ongoing negotiations of community-led culture-centered advocacy and activist strategies that resist the racist, gendered, and classed structures of neocolonial knowledge production in the metropole in the North, we attend to Southern practices of Openness that radically disrupt the whiteness of hegemonic Open Science. These decolonizing practices foreground data sovereignty, community ownership, and public ownership of knowledge resources as the bases of resistance to the colonial-capitalist interests of hegemonic Open Science.
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