The emergent theme from my travels this summer presenting academic papers on tech for social change hasn’t been “is it good or bad,” but instead “why are their good and bad outcomes, and can these be generalizable?” It’s this kind of question that motivates me as a political scientist. Yes, indeed technology can be used … Continue reading The Impact of Tech: Getting Past ‘Good Versus Bad’
Africa
Crowdsourcing Done Well: A follow up from yesterday’s post
Yesterday's post may have been a bit of a downer given the critical position on crowdsourcing that I took. While I think a critical eye is necessary to grow the space, I wouldn't want to leave out what's being done well. With that in mind I wanted to point folks to Patrick Meier's recent post … Continue reading Crowdsourcing Done Well: A follow up from yesterday’s post
So I felt like I should add something about tech…
So the last few things that went up were academic self-critique and a book review. Since "tech" is in the blog title, I thought I should put something up that touches on the digital world. For now, we'll revisit something a little older and I'll make sure I get something new up this week that's tech for … Continue reading So I felt like I should add something about tech…
Daniel Posner’s “Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa”
Systematic analysis of ethno-linguistic cleavages and competition in Africa, and the world more broadly, are often chalked up to “ancient ethnic hatred” or over-simplistic cultural analyses of legacy political economics. Daniel Posner’s “Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa” takes the question of ethnicity in African politics and unpacks the cleavages between ethno-linguistic groups in Zambia … Continue reading Daniel Posner’s “Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa”
ICTD 2012
Just got back from ICTD 2012 down at Georgia Tech, and am excited about the state of the field. This conference is a gathering for academics and practitioners working in the international development and technology spaces. We got to see talks about everything from mapping to public health, mobile phone applications and new open source … Continue reading ICTD 2012
“BBC keen on paternalistic analysis of Libyan governance”
Editor's Note: I don't think the BBC is actually keen on paternalistic analyses of Libyan governance. The title of this post is a riff on the title of the BBC article that it's based on. From what I could tell on the BBC News Africa landing page, Libyans are not interested in democracy and want … Continue reading “BBC keen on paternalistic analysis of Libyan governance”
A follow up post on the hippos
So I realized that maybe my interest in hippos body surfing in Gabon might have seemed random, and wanted to write a quick follow up post on why, as a doctoral student studying conflict prevention and social resilience, I enjoyed the article so much. Aside from the hippos, which were pretty cute. There are a … Continue reading A follow up post on the hippos
The economics of body surfing hippos
I'm not sure how many people scanned through the scrolling photos on the top of the BBC website today, but I stopped on the one that featured two hippos body surfing. I wasn't sure what the article was about, but I'm a sucker for anthropomorphic animals. It turns out that these hippos live in Gabon, … Continue reading The economics of body surfing hippos
Charles P. Martin-Shields 