Monitoring Movements in Development Aid

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262317028
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Monitoring Movements in Development Aid by : Casper Bruun Jensen

Download or read book Monitoring Movements in Development Aid written by Casper Bruun Jensen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-08-30 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of emerging information infrastructures that are intended to increase accountability and effectiveness in partnerships for development aid. In Monitoring Movements in Development Aid, Casper Jensen and Brit Winthereik consider the processes, social practices, and infrastructures that are emerging to monitor development aid, discussing both empirical phenomena and their methodological and analytical challenges. Jensen and Winthereik focus on efforts by aid organizations to make better use of information technology; they analyze a range of development aid information infrastructures created to increase accountability and effectiveness. They find that constructing these infrastructures is not simply a matter of designing and implementing technology but entails forging new platforms for action that are simultaneously imaginative and practical, conceptual and technical. After presenting an analytical platform that draws on science and technology studies and the anthropology of development, Jensen and Winthereik present an ethnography- based analysis of the mutually defining relationship between aid partnerships and infrastructures; the crucial role of users (both actual and envisioned) in aid information infrastructures; efforts to make aid information dynamic and accessible; existing monitoring activities of an environmental NGO; and national-level performance audits, which encompass concerns of both external control and organizational learning. Jensen and Winthereik argue that central to the emerging movement to monitor development aid is the blurring of means and ends: aid information infrastructures are both technological platforms for knowledge about aid and forms of aid and empowerment in their own right.

Development Aid Confronts Politics

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Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
ISBN 13 : 0870034022
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Development Aid Confronts Politics by : Thomas Carothers

Download or read book Development Aid Confronts Politics written by Thomas Carothers and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new lens on development is changing the world of international aid. The overdue recognition that development in all sectors is an inherently political process is driving aid providers to try to learn how to think and act politically. Major donors are pursuing explicitly political goals alongside their traditional socioeconomic aims and introducing more politically informed methods throughout their work. Yet these changes face an array of external and internal obstacles, from heightened sensitivity on the part of many aid-receiving governments about foreign political interventionism to inflexible aid delivery mechanisms and entrenched technocratic preferences within many aid organizations. This pathbreaking book assesses the progress and pitfalls of the attempted politics revolution in development aid and charts a constructive way forward. Contents: Introduction 1. The New Politics Agenda The Original Framework: 1960s-1980s 2. Apolitical Roots Breaking the Political Taboo: 1990s-2000s 3. The Door Opens to Politics 4. Advancing Political Goals 5. Toward Politically Informed Methods The Way Forward 6. Politically Smart Development Aid 7. The Unresolved Debate on Political Goals 8. The Integration Frontier Conclusion 9. The Long Road to Politics

Aid for Trade at a Glance 2017 Promoting Trade, Inclusiveness and Connectivity for Sustainable Development

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Publisher : OECD Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9264278478
Total Pages : 553 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (642 download)

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Book Synopsis Aid for Trade at a Glance 2017 Promoting Trade, Inclusiveness and Connectivity for Sustainable Development by : OECD

Download or read book Aid for Trade at a Glance 2017 Promoting Trade, Inclusiveness and Connectivity for Sustainable Development written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition focuses on trade connectivity, which is critical for inclusiveness and sustainable development. Physical connectivity enables the movement of goods and services to local, regional and global markets.

Evaluating Development Aid

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9788170369073
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (69 download)

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Book Synopsis Evaluating Development Aid by : Basil E. Cracknell

Download or read book Evaluating Development Aid written by Basil E. Cracknell and published by . This book was released on 2000-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Assessing Aid

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Publisher : World Bank Publications
ISBN 13 : 9780195211238
Total Pages : 164 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (112 download)

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Book Synopsis Assessing Aid by :

Download or read book Assessing Aid written by and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1998 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assessing Aid determines that the effectiveness of aid is not decided by the amount received but rather the institutional and policy environment into which it is accepted. It examines how development assistance can be more effective at reducing global poverty and gives five mainrecommendations for making aid more effective: targeting financial aid to poor countries with good policies and strong economic management; providing policy-based aid to demonstrated reformers; using simpler instruments to transfer resources to countries with sound management; focusing projects oncreating and transmitting knowledge and capacity; and rethinking the internal incentives of aid agencies.

Ten Steps to a Results-based Monitoring and Evaluation System

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Publisher : World Bank Publications
ISBN 13 : 0821382896
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (213 download)

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Book Synopsis Ten Steps to a Results-based Monitoring and Evaluation System by : Jody Zall Kusek

Download or read book Ten Steps to a Results-based Monitoring and Evaluation System written by Jody Zall Kusek and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2004-06-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An effective state is essential to achieving socio-economic and sustainable development. With the advent of globalization, there are growing pressures on governments and organizations around the world to be more responsive to the demands of internal and external stakeholders for good governance, accountability and transparency, greater development effectiveness, and delivery of tangible results. Governments, parliaments, citizens, the private sector, NGOs, civil society, international organizations and donors are among the stakeholders interested in better performance. As demands for greater accountability and real results have increased, there is an attendant need for enhanced results-based monitoring and evaluation of policies, programs, and projects. This Handbook provides a comprehensive ten-step model that will help guide development practitioners through the process of designing and building a results-based monitoring and evaluation system. These steps begin with a OC Readiness AssessmentOCO and take the practitioner through the design, management, and importantly, the sustainability of such systems. The Handbook describes each step in detail, the tasks needed to complete each one, and the tools available to help along the way."

Delivering Aid Differently

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Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
ISBN 13 : 081570481X
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (157 download)

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Book Synopsis Delivering Aid Differently by : Wolfgang Fengler

Download or read book Delivering Aid Differently written by Wolfgang Fengler and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a new reality of aid. Gone is the traditional bilateral relationship, the old-fashioned mode of delivering aid, and the perception of the third world as a homogenous block of poor countries in the south. Delivering Aid Differently describes the new realities of a $200 billion aid industry that has overtaken this traditional model of development assistance. As the title suggests, aid must now be delivered differently. Here, case study authors consider the results of aid in their own countries, highlighting field-based lessons on how aid works on the ground, while focusing on problems in current aid delivery and on promising approaches to resolving these problems. Contributors include Cut Dian Agustina (World Bank), Getnet Alemu (College of Development Studies, Addis Ababa University), Rustam Aminjanov (NAMO Consulting), Ek Chanboreth and Sok Hach (Economic Institute of Cambodia), Firuz Kataev and Matin Kholmatov (NAMO Consulting), Johannes F. Linn (Wolfensohn Center for Development at Brookings), Abdul Malik (World Bank, South Asia), Harry Masyrafah and Jock M. J. A. McKeon (World Bank, Aceh), Francis M. Mwega (Department of Economics, University of Nairobi), Rebecca Winthrop (Center for Universal Education at Brookings), Ahmad Zaki Fahmi (World Bank)

Documenting Aftermath

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262552752
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Documenting Aftermath by : Megan Finn

Download or read book Documenting Aftermath written by Megan Finn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how changing public information infrastructures shaped people's experience of earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989. When an earthquake happens in California today, residents may look to the United States Geological Survey for online maps that show the quake's epicenter, turn to Twitter for government bulletins and the latest news, check Facebook for updates from friends and family, and count on help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). One hundred and fifty years ago, however, FEMA and other government agencies did not exist, and information came by telegraph and newspaper. In Documenting Aftermath, Megan Finn explores changing public information infrastructures and how they shaped people's experience of disaster, examining postearthquake information and communication practices in three Northern California earthquakes: the 1868 Hayward Fault earthquake, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. She then analyzes the institutions, policies, and technologies that shape today's postdisaster information landscape. Finn argues that information orders—complex constellations of institutions, technologies, and practices—influence how we act in, experience, and document events. What Finn terms event epistemologies, constituted both by historical documents and by researchers who study them, explain how information orders facilitate particular possibilities for knowledge. After the 1868 earthquake, the Chamber of Commerce telegraphed reassurances to out-of-state investors while local newspapers ran sensational earthquake narratives; in 1906, families and institutions used innovative techniques for locating people; and in 1989, government institutions and the media developed a symbiotic relationship in information dissemination. Today, government disaster response plans and new media platforms imagine different sources of informational authority yet work together shaping disaster narratives.

The Politics of Invisibility

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262548860
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis The Politics of Invisibility by : Olga Kuchinskaya

Download or read book The Politics of Invisibility written by Olga Kuchinskaya and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lessons from the massive Chernobyl nuclear accident about how we deal with modern hazards that are largely imperceptible. Before Fukushima, the most notorious large-scale nuclear accident the world had seen was Chernobyl in 1986. The fallout from Chernobyl covered vast areas in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Europe. Belarus, at the time a Soviet republic, suffered heavily: nearly a quarter of its territory was covered with long-lasting radionuclides. Yet the damage from the massive fallout was largely imperceptible; contaminated communities looked exactly like noncontaminated ones. It could be known only through constructed representations of it. In The Politics of Invisibility, Olga Kuchinskaya explores how we know what we know about Chernobyl, describing how the consequences of a nuclear accident were made invisible. Her analysis sheds valuable light on how we deal with other modern hazards—toxins or global warming—that are largely imperceptible to the human senses. Kuchinskaya describes the production of invisibility of Chernobyl's consequences in Belarus—practices that limit public attention to radiation and make its health effects impossible to observe. Just as mitigating radiological contamination requires infrastructural solutions, she argues, the production and propagation of invisibility also involves infrastructural efforts, from redefining the scope and nature of the accident's consequences to reshaping research and protection practices. Kuchinskaya finds vast fluctuations in recognition, tracing varyingly successful efforts to conceal or reveal Chernobyl's consequences at different levels—among affected populations, scientists, government, media, and international organizations. The production of invisibility, she argues, is a function of power relations.

New Practices of Comparison, Quantification and Expertise in Education

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429877021
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (298 download)

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Book Synopsis New Practices of Comparison, Quantification and Expertise in Education by : Christina Elde Mølstad

Download or read book New Practices of Comparison, Quantification and Expertise in Education written by Christina Elde Mølstad and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-29 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Practices of Comparison, Quantification and Expertise in Education discusses contemporary trends and activities related to comparisons and quantifications. It aims to help scholars to conduct empirically based research on how comparisons and quantifications are instituted in practice at different levels in the educational system. The book furthers discussions on policy by looking at the kinds of activities that comparisons and quantifications lead to at an international, regional and national level. Most of the book’s chapters are based on empirical research conducted in different research projects. The book thus brings all these projects together and discusses them as activities promoted by the reasoning of comparisons and quantifications. New Practices of Comparison, Quantification and Expertise in Education will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of comparative education, curriculum research and policy studies. It will also appeal to those in the fields of teacher education, including student teachers.

Underground

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262366096
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Underground by : Blake Atwood

Download or read book Underground written by Blake Atwood and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Iranians forged a vibrant, informal video distribution infrastructure when their government banned all home video technology in 1983. In 1983, the Iranian government banned the personal use of home video technology. In Underground, Blake Atwood recounts how in response to the ban, technology enthusiasts, cinephiles, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens forged an illegal but complex underground system for video distribution. Atwood draws on archival sources including trade publications, newspapers, memoirs, films, and laws, but at the heart of the book lies a corpus of oral history interviews conducted with participants in the underground. He argues that videocassettes helped to institutionalize the broader underground within the Islamic Republic. As Atwood shows, the videocassette underground reveals a great deal about how people construct vibrant cultures beneath repressive institutions. It was not just that Iranians gained access to banned movies, but rather that they established routes, acquired technical knowledge, broke the law, and created rituals by passing and trading plastic videocassettes. As material objects, the videocassettes were a means of negotiating the power of the state and the agency of its citizens. By the time the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance lifted the ban in 1994, millions of videocassettes were circulating efficiently and widely throughout the country. The very presence of a video underground signaled the failure of state policy to regulate media. Embedded in the informal infrastructure--even in the videocassettes themselves--was the triumph of everyday people over the state.

Assembling Policy

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262029871
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis Assembling Policy by : Sebastian Ureta

Download or read book Assembling Policy written by Sebastian Ureta and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how human beings are brought into the planning of complex infrastructure projects, through analysis of a controversial public transportation project. Policymakers are regularly confronted by complaints that ordinary people are left out of the planning and managing of complex infrastructure projects. In this book, Sebastián Ureta argues that humans, both individually and collectively, are always at the heart of infrastructure policy; the issue is how they are brought into it. Ureta develops his argument through the case of Transantiago, a massive public transportation project in the city of Santiago, proposed in 2000, launched in 2007, and in 2012 called “the worst public policy ever implemented in our country” by a Chilean government spokesman. Ureta examines Transantiago as a policy assemblage formed by an array of heterogeneous elements—including, crucially, “human devices,” or artifacts and practices through which humans were brought into infrastructure planning and implementation. Ureta traces the design and operation of Transantiago through four configurations: crisis, infrastructuration, disruption, and normalization. In the crisis phase, humans were enacted both as consumers and as participants in the transformation of Santiago into a “world-class” city, but during infrastructuration the “active citizen” went missing. The launch of Transantiago caused huge disruptions, in part because users challenged their role as mere consumers and instead enacted unexpected human devices. Resisting calls for radical reform, policymakers insisted on normalizing Transantiago, transforming it into a permanent failing system. Drawing on Chile's experience, Ureta argues that if we understand policy as a series of heterogeneous assemblages, infrastructure policymaking would be more inclusive, reflexive, and responsible.

The Infrastructural South

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262546876
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis The Infrastructural South by : Jonathan Silver

Download or read book The Infrastructural South written by Jonathan Silver and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at the infrastructural landscape of Africa amid the third wave of urbanization, drawing on case studies from Africa and extending further afield. The Infrastructural South represents a major theoretical contribution to the study of infrastructure’s role in the third wave of urbanization centered on Africa. Based on over a decade of empirical research, Silver’s sweeping examination probes many of contemporary urbanism’s most exciting and pressing issues through the lens of the Global South. Focusing on Uganda, Ghana, and South Africa, Silver’s conceptually innovative chapters explore the way access to energy, water, sanitation, transit, and information technologies shape everyday life as they map the dynamic relations between cities, technology, and the environment. Pushing readers to look at the wider worlds that suffuse urban systems, this theoretical and geographical perspective treats Africa’s rapidly transforming towns and cities as complex sites of disruption, emancipation, and contradiction. In doing so, it shows how the proliferating urbanisms and contested techno-environments arise from shifting priorities in infrastructure planning, politics, and financing gaps. As urban issues become a key twenty-first-century challenge for Africa, Silver offers a comprehensive reworking of our understanding of urbanization. The Infrastructural South rethinks how global scholarship approaches infrastructure, laying pathways for future research at the intersection of technology, environmental urbanism, and urban politics.

Gaming the Metrics

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262537931
Total Pages : 307 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Gaming the Metrics by : Mario Biagioli

Download or read book Gaming the Metrics written by Mario Biagioli and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The traditional academic imperative to “publish or perish” is increasingly coupled with the newer necessity of “impact or perish”—the requirement that a publication have “impact,” as measured by a variety of metrics, including citations, views, and downloads. Gaming the Metrics examines how the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced radically new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The contributors show that the metrics-based “audit culture” has changed the ecology of research, fostering the gaming and manipulation of quantitative indicators, which lead to the invention of such novel forms of misconduct as citation rings and variously rigged peer reviews. The chapters, written by both scholars and those in the trenches of academic publication, provide a map of academic fraud and misconduct today. They consider such topics as the shortcomings of metrics, the gaming of impact factors, the emergence of so-called predatory journals, the “salami slicing” of scientific findings, the rigging of global university rankings, and the creation of new watchdogs and forensic practices.

Remaking Berlin

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262539772
Total Pages : 473 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Remaking Berlin by : Timothy Moss

Download or read book Remaking Berlin written by Timothy Moss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of Berlin's turbulent history through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures. In Remaking Berlin, Timothy Moss takes a novel perspective on Berlin's turbulent twentieth-century history, examining it through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures. He shows that, through a century of changing regimes, geopolitical interventions, and socioeconomic volatility, Berlin's networked urban infrastructures have acted as medium and manifestation of municipal, national, and international politics and policies. Moss traces the coevolution of Berlin and its infrastructure systems from the creation of Greater Berlin in 1920 to remunicipalization of services in 2020, encompassing democratic, fascist, and socialist regimes. Throughout, he explores the tension between obduracy and change in Berlin's infrastructures. Examining the choices made by utility managers, politicians, and government officials, Moss makes visible systems that we often take for granted. Moss describes the reorganization of infrastructure systems to meet the needs of a new unitary city after Berlin's incorporation in 1920, and how utilities delivered on political promises; the insidious embedding of repression, racism, autarky, and militarization within the networked city under the Nazis; and the resilience of Berlin's infrastructures during wartime and political division. He examines East Berlin's socialist infrastructural ideal (and its under-resourced systems), West Berlin's insular existence (and its aspirations of system autarky), and reunified Berlin's privatization of utilities (subsequently challenged by social movements). Taking Berlin as an exemplar, Moss's account will inspire researchers to take a fresh look at urban infrastructure histories, offering new ways of conceptualizing the multiple temporalities and spatialities of the networked city.

Infrastructural Brutalism

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262358727
Total Pages : 378 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Infrastructural Brutalism by : Michael Truscello

Download or read book Infrastructural Brutalism written by Michael Truscello and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How "drowned town" literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and "death train" narratives represent the brutality of industrial infrastructures. In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this "infrastructural brutalism"--a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures.

The Charisma Machine

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262353903
Total Pages : 323 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis The Charisma Machine by : Morgan G. Ames

Download or read book The Charisma Machine written by Morgan G. Ames and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating examination of technological utopianism and its complicated consequences. In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why—despite its failures—the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development. Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop per Child promised to transform the lives of children across the Global South with a small, sturdy, and cheap laptop computer, powered by a hand crank. In reality, the project fell short in many ways—starting with the hand crank, which never materialized. Yet the project remained charismatic to many who were captivated by its claims of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach. Behind its promises, OLPC, like many technology projects that make similarly grand claims, had a fundamentally flawed vision of who the computer was made for and what role technology should play in learning. Drawing on fifty years of history and a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, Ames reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for “technically precocious boys”—idealized younger versions of the developers themselves—rather than the children who were actually using them. The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.