Sakar – Research for Thesis

I conducted 3 expert interviews and looked at a number of approaches that others have taken on education about the digital. It was quite interesting to see a number of concepts: digital harm reduction, data-is-power etc pop-up in the reading. A lot of these terms point in the same direction I want to go… but I am not sure how they differ from each other and what putting all this into a cohesive whole looks like.

Since my aim was to approach my topic from a theoretical angle, I spent the last week looking for, finding and then culling a LOT of journal articles, strategy documents, and book chapters about my topic. I must have looked at about 100 and have about 30 saved in my Zotero for reading. Since I felt my topic is fast evolving and not fully defined into a discipline as yet (though one can see the first signs of that happening) I opted to ignore older articles and focus on material for the last two years only… unless something looked very relevant. I suspect I will want to add a few more things to the list below. Then I will read most if not all of the papers… and do summaries ONLY of the ones I find interesting.

Review

While I read a lot of abstracts, I have not read any of the papers in full and attempted to digest it. Thus, I can’t do a review of a single paper. However, my search and reading of abstracts has indicated to me that I should probably think of what I have encountered in this way:

Meta/Conceptual – These are both papers about how concepts like Human Rights, inclusion would be impacted by digitization. But also these are frameworks on how to do/thinking about digitization as a whole.

Domain Specific – These are papers that look at specific case studies or data on how digitalization in one domain (education, finance) and usually also some limited geography (Experiences with Financial Inclusion Digital Transformation in Peru… might be a title in this category). These will be important and useful to validate or challenge the meta/conceptual stuff.

Technology Specific – I am still not sure this is a real category in the work… but I get the feeling not everything I have picked fits in the last two. So this category might evolve. But for now I am seeing a group of papers that actually look at how specific affordances or specific elements in the topology of the global digital infrastructure impact a specific issue.

Dream Review

“This toolkit and training package was both immediately useful and thought-provoking. The material and facilitator did an excellent job getting us to look out into a more digitized future and project the kinds of sociopolitical changes that might lie just past the horizon. However, the real benefit of the toolkit was that it helped in bringing us back to today, and how those possible digital futures could be impacted by the choices my team makes on the humanitarian projects and program we are designing right now.” Project Manager, Rural Economic Empowerment