Tech Imaginaries
Energy Crisis and Everyday Life in South Africa’s Silicon Cape
Buch in deiner Nähe kaufen
Beschreibung
This book interrogates everyday implications of digital developments in times of profound energy crises and transition to renewable energy in South Africa, mapping interrelated controversies. Drawing on more than two decades of ethnographic research on the Cape Flats on the outskirts of Cape Town, the book analyses what digital infrastructures and technologies do for- and to- people in this (former) township area on the 2 Cape Flats, and how this is related to energy in a myriad of ways. The authors empirically demonstrate how technologies emerge in, and with, societies and people’s everyday practices, building on fieldwork with households and local tech start-ups. They stake a claim for centering situated, everyday (work) lives and the innovation emerging from the Cape Flats in debates about just digital and energy futures at a time where energy systems are changing at rapid pace and scale.
Karen Waltorp is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her expertise is in the anthropology of technology, anthropology of energy, visual and digital anthropology, and gender and minority studies.
Asnath Paula Kambunga is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in how people use digital technologies in their everyday lives, develop technologies to address social problems, and in co-designed technologies that amplify marginal voices.
This book interrogates everyday implications of digital developments in times of profound energy crises and transition to renewable energy in South Africa, mapping interrelated controversies. Drawing on more than two decades of ethnographic research on the Cape Flats on the outskirts of Cape Town, the book analyses what digital infrastructures and technologies do for- and to- people in this (former) township area on the 2 Cape Flats, and how this is related to energy in a myriad of ways. The authors empirically demonstrate how technologies emerge in, and with, societies and people’s everyday practices, building on fieldwork with households and local tech start-ups. They stake a claim for centering situated, everyday (work) lives and the innovation emerging from the Cape Flats in debates about just digital and energy futures at a time where energy systems are changing at rapid pace and scale.
Investigates what the digital-energy nexus affords for tech giants, local tech entrepreneurs and township people Offers an empirically grounded analysis of the digital-energy nexus in Cape Town, South Africa Provides a cutting-edge, theoretically sophisticated case study of a global problem
Autor*in
Karen Waltorp
Themen in »Tech Imaginaries«
Digital-energy nexus Digital-energy Cape Town South Africa township Silicon Cape global tech giants Tech entrepreneurs start-ups technological infrastructure Cape Flats digital revolution energy crisis decolonial design methods digital development