Information Technologies & International  Development

Publishes Special Section on ICTD 2016 

More than 10 years ago, the first information and communication technologies and development (ICTD) conference was held in Berkeley, California. The now annual conference is a place to understand, examine, critique, and refine the persistent and pervasive hope that ICT (Information and Communication Technology) can support human development.  In June 2016, nearly 300 scholarly researchers from around the world gathered for the eighth ICTD conference at the University of Michigan to explore the role of ICTs in social, political, and economic development. In this Special Section (guest-edited by Susan Wyche) we present four selected papers from the conference proceedings.

These articles reflect the breadth of disciplines that epitomize the ICTD community (from communication, policy, human-computer interaction, and information studies). They also focus on a range of populations and geographic regions including foreign brides in Singapore and mobile phone repairers in Kampala.  Though diverse, all articles demonstrate how the community is expanding the scope of its concerns beyond traditional areas within socioeconomic development (e.g., health, education, and livelihoods) to also include a wider range of activities, (e.g., repair, privacy, and women’s empowerment).

We are pleased to announce that these five articles have been published in  Information Technologies & International Development on October 26, 2017.  Please Ctrl+Click on the article titles below for direct links to the papers of interest.  We look forward to hearing your feedback.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

From the Guest Editor ― Editorial Introduction
Susan Wyche

Deploying ICTs for Development: An Evolutionary Perspective
Balaji Parthasarathy, Yuko Aoyama

Mobile Phones and Gender Empowerment: Negotiating the Essentialist–Aspirational Dialectic 
Hoan Nguyen, Arul Chib, Ramaswami Mahalingam

Privacy in Repair: An Analysis of the Privacy Challenges Surrounding Broken Digital Artifacts in Bangladesh
Syed Ahmed Ishtiaque, Shion Guha, Md. Rashidujjaman Rifat, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Nicola Dell

Caring for the “Next Billion” Mobile Handsets: Proprietary Closures and the Work of Repair
Lara Houston, Steven J. Jackson

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
François Bar, Kentaro Toyama
Co-Editors in Chief                                                  

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor

Susan Wyche
Guest Editor