Readings

• Truman’s Inaugural Speech, delivered January 20, 1949.
  Transcript available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=13282 – axzz1vI9oQvaQ (Focus on the sentences following “Fourth, we must embark on a bold new program…”)
• Friedman, Thomas L. 2006. “Chapter 1. While I was sleeping” In The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, pp. 1-49. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Marx, L. 1997. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept” Social Research, Vol. 64, No. 3: 965-988.
• Heilbroner, Robert L. 1994. “Do Machines Make History?” In Merrit Roe Smith & Leo Marx (Eds) Does Technology Drive History?, pp. 53-65.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Thomas, A. 2000. “Meanings and Views of Development” In T. Allen and A. Thomas (Eds) Poverty and Development: Into the 21st century, pp. 23-48. Oxford University Press.

Optional readings

• Winner, L. 1999. “Do Artifacts have Politics?” In D. Mackenzie and J. Wajcman (Eds.) The Social Shaping of Technology, pp. 28-40. Buckingham: Open University Press.
• Bijker, W. 1997. “King of the Road: The Social Construction of the Safety Bicycle” in Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs. MA: MIT Press.
• Sen, A. 2001. “What is Development About?” In Meier, G. and J. Stiglitz (Eds) Frontiers of Development Economics: The future in perspective, 506-513. Oxford University Press.
• Cowan, R. S. 1987. “The Consumption Junction: a proposal for research strategies in the sociology of technology.” In W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, & T. J. Pinch (Eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, pp. 261-280. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Suggested readings for debate in the next class

• Parayil, G. “The Green Revolution in India: A Case Study of Technological Change.” Technology and Culture, Vol. 33 (1992), p. 737–756.
• Shiva, V. 1991. “The Green Revolution in Punjab.” The Ecologist, Vol. 21, No. 2.
• NYTimes Articles – Farmer Suicides in Karnataka, India
  • http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/world/asia/19india.html?emc=eta1
  • http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/world/debts-and-drought-drive-india-s-farmers-to-despair.html

• Smillie, I. 2000. “Chapter 3: The Best of the West: Thinking Big.” In Mastering the Machine Revisited: Poverty, Aid and Technology, pp. 35-48.Verlag.
• Hans Peter Arp and Karsten Baumgärtel. 2005. Case Study: The Consequences of the Akosombo Dam. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. (You can skip or browse Section 3.)
• Mitchell, T. 1991. “America’s Egypt: Discourse in the Development Industry.” Middle East Report, pp.255-272.

Optional readings

For a sense of the variety of concerns and critiques directed at ‘Thinking Big’:

• Easterly, W. 2002. “Aid for Investment” in The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. MIT Press
• The issue of ‘sustainable development’ raised in the UN’s  Brundtland report (Read chapters 1 and 2).

• Schumacher, E. F. 1973.”Buddhist Economics” and “Social and Economic Problems Calling for the Development of Intermediate Technology” In Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, pp. 50-59, 161-179. Harper and Row Publishers.
• Chambers, R. 1995. “Poverty and Livelihoods: Whose reality counts?” Environment and Urbanization, Vol. 7, No. 1:173-204.
• Prahalad, C.K., and Allen Hammond. 2002. “Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably.” Harvard Business School Publication Corp.
• Fisher, M. 2006. “Income is Development: KickStart’s Pumps Help Kenyan Farmers Transition to a Cash Economy.” Innovations. MIT Press.

Optional readings

• Bilger, Burkhard. 2009. “Hearth Surgery.” The New Yorker, December 21.
• Bornstein, D. 2007. “The Light in my Head Went On.” in How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. Oxford University Press. (p. 21-40)

• Keniston, K. 2004. “Introduction: The Four Digital Divides.” in K. Keniston and R. Kumar (Eds) Experience in India: Bridging the Digital Divide, Sage Publications, p. 11-36.
• Webster, F. 2002. “The Information Society Revisited.” in L. Lievrouw and S. Livingstone. (Eds) The Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping of ICTs, p. 443-457.

Optional readings

• World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), Geneva Declaration of Principles. (to get a taste of the discourse about digital technologies currently being produced by development institutions)
• Darnton, Robert. 2000. “An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris.” The American Historical Review 105 (1), February.
• Mark Warschauer and Morgan Ames. 2010. “Can One Laptop Per Child Save the World’s Poor?” Journal of International Affairs 64(1)
• Brendan Luyt. 2008. “The One Laptop Per Child Project and the Negotiation of Technological Meaning” First Monday, 13(6)

• For the guest lecture:
• Corbett, Sara. 2010. “Video Games Win a Beachhead in the Classroom.” The New York Times, September 15.
• Gee, James Paul. 2003. “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.” Computers in Entertainment 1 (1) .

For the regular lecture:

• Cockburn, C. 1992. “The Circuit of Technology: Gender, identity and power.” In R. Silverstone and E.Hirsch(Eds) Consuming Technologies: Media and information in domestic spaces, pp. 32-47. London, Routledge.
• Kuriyan R. and K. Kirtner. 2009. “Constructing Class Boundaries: Gender, Aspiration and Shared Computing.” Information Technology and International Development 5(1): 17-29.

Optional readings

• Srinivasan, Janaki. Forthcoming in 2012. “Looking beyond Information Provision: The importance of being a Kiosk Operator in The Sustainable Access In Rural India (SARI) Project, Tamilnadu.” Special Issue, Information Technologies & International Development Vol 8.
• DIT, Government of India. 2005. Information and Communications Technologies for Development: A Comparative Analysis of Impacts and Costs from India. A report. Read: Introduction (pp. 4-10) and Chap. VIII. on the Bhoomi project (pp. 134-171)
• Kuriyan, Renee, Isha Ray and Kentaro Toyama. 2008. “Information and communication technologies for development: The bottom of the pyramid model in practice.” The Information Society, 24.

• Burrell, J. and K. Anderson. 2008. “I have great desires to look beyond my world:” trajectories of information and communication technology use among Ghanaians living abroad. New Media and Society, 10(2):203-224.

• Bailur S. 2007. The complexities of community participation in ICT for development projects: The case of “Our Voices”. Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries.
• Gladwell, M. 2010. “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted.” The New Yorker, October 4.
• Mudliar, P., Donner, J., and Thies, B. 2012. “Emergent Practices Around CGNet Swara, A Voice Forum for Citizen Journalism in Rural India.” In the proceedings of the international conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, March.

Optional readings

• Goldstein and Rotich, 2008 “Digitally Networked Technology in Kenya’s 2007-2008 Post-Election Crisis.” Internet and Democracy Case Study series. Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
• Kalathil, Shanthi and Taylor Boas. 2001. “The Internet and State Control in Authoritarian Regimes: China, Cuba, and the Counterrevolution.” First Monday (8).
• Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. “Political Repression 2.0.” The New York Times, September 1.
• Beiser, Vince. 2011. “Massive Biometric Project Gives Millions of Indians an ID.” Wired, September.
• Polgreen, Lydia. 2011. “With National Database, India Tries to Reach the Poor.” The New York Times, September 1, sec. World / Asia Pacific.

• Jensen, Robert. 2007. “The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 122 (3): 879–924.
• Morawczynski, O. and M.Pikens. 2009. Poor People Using Mobile Financial Services: Observations on Customer Usage and Impact from M-PESA. CGAP Brief, Consultative Group to Assist the Poor.

• Rangaswamy, N. and Sambasivan. N. 2011.“Cutting Chai, Jugaad, and Here Pheri: towards UbiComp for a global community.” In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. Special issue on the Digital Divide edited by Matt Jones and Gary Marsden. 15(6): 553-564.

Optional readings

• Smyth, T., Kumar, S., Medhi, I., and Toyama, K. 2010. “Where there’s a will there’s a way: Mobile media sharing in urban India.” In the proceedings of the 28^th international conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April.

• Sen, A. 2001. “What is Development About?” In Meier, G. and J. Stiglitz (Eds) Frontiers of Development Economics: The future in perspective, 506-513. Oxford University Press.
• Liang, L. 2010. “Access Beyond Developmentalism: Technology and the Intellectual Life of the Poor.” Information Technology and International Development Vol. 6: 65-67.