Mobile Assemblages and Maendeleo in Rural Kenya

Mobile Assemblages and Maendeleo in Rural Kenya
Author: Jerop Komen
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-09-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9956552275

In this book, Leah Komen explores the impact of mobile telephony on the lives of people in rural Kenya. The book analyses the outcomes of complex intersections and interactions between mobile phones, individuals, and the broader society as distinct from the traditional cause-effect relationships in the discourse of development in the changing world. It subverts the traditional notion of synchronic development that ignores target populations' involvement in decision-making and sees development from the lens of developed economies where information and communication technologies like mobile telephones have originated. Komen's analysis advances a diachronic type of development that focuses on human technology's interrelationships instead of the synchronic model that privileges technology as engendering social transformations and development. The diachronic model is fundamentally Maendeleo, a Swahili term denoting process, participation, progress, and growth, and views social transformations and development as an interaction between mobile telephony users and their specific contexts. The book argues that the mobile phone has become an increasingly personalised device. It encourages a sense of community through the sharing of the device by multiple users, promotes co-presence and interpersonal communication, enhances kinship ties and social connectedness, and creates new ways of organising and conducting everyday socioeconomic activities. However, it also can disintegrate relationships and remodel some. This is a book about power negotiation, gender relations, cultural inclinations, and socio-economic dispositions within the context of mobile telephony's domestic use to facilitate social change and development.

Prosperity in the Twenty-First Century

Prosperity in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Henrietta L. Moore
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2023-06-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1800084455

Prosperity in the Twenty-First Century sets out a new vision for prosperity in the twenty-first century and how it can be achieved for all. The volume challenges orthodox understandings of economic models, but goes beyond contemporary debates to show how social innovation drives economic value. Drawing on substantive research in the UK, Lebanon and Kenya, it develops new concepts, frameworks, models and metrics for prosperity across a wide range of contexts, emphasising commonalities and differences. Its distinctive approach goes beyond defining and measuring prosperity – addressing the debate about the failures of GDP – to formulating and describing what is needed to make prosperity a realisable proposition for specific people living in specific locales. Departing from general propositions about post-growth to delineate pathways to prosperity, the volume emphasises that visions of the good life are diverse and require empirical work co-designed with local communities and stakeholders to drive change. It is essential reading for policymakers who are stuck, local government officers who need new tools, activists who wonder what is next, academics in need of refreshment, and students and people of all ages who want a way forward.

Multicultural Andragogy for Transformative Learning

Multicultural Andragogy for Transformative Learning
Author: Peltz, David P.
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2018-07-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 152253475X

As individuals progress through each stage of life, they continue to learn and grow intellectually. However, what may be a conducive learning environment for a child may not be as effective for an adult, creating a need to understand how to aid adults in being successful learners in their later life. Multicultural Andragogy for Transformative Learning provides a diverse collection of positions related to adult learning. The book touches on a variety of topics including autonomous learning as a transformative experience, mixing cultures through intercultural methodology, and integrating cultural perspectives into organizational learning. As a publication with a focus on andragogy, this proves a useful resource for academicians, higher education administrators, and educators who teach both traditional and non-traditional students in higher education.

Handbook of Research on Social, Cultural, and Educational Considerations of Indigenous Knowledge in Developing Countries

Handbook of Research on Social, Cultural, and Educational Considerations of Indigenous Knowledge in Developing Countries
Author: Ngulube, Patrick
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2016-09-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1522508392

Knowledge systems are an essential aspect to the preservation of a community’s culture. In developing countries, this community-based knowledge has significant influence on such things as decision making and problem solving. The Handbook of Research on Social, Cultural, and Educational Considerations of Indigenous Knowledge in Developing Countries is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on the importance of knowledge and value systems at the community level and ways indigenous people utilize this information. Highlighting impacts on culture and education in developing nations, this book is ideally designed for researchers, academicians, policy makers, students, and professionals interested in contemporary debates on indigenous knowledge systems.

Managing Chronicity in Unequal States

Managing Chronicity in Unequal States
Author: Laura Montesi
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-11-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 180008028X

By portraying the circumstances of people living with chronic conditions in radically different contexts, from Alzheimer’s patients in the UK to homeless people with psychiatric disorders in India, Managing Chronicity in Unequal States offers glimpses of what dealing with medically complex conditions in stratified societies means. While in some places the state regulates and intrudes on the most intimate aspects of chronic living, in others it is utterly and criminally absent. Either way, it is a present/absent actor that deeply conditions people’s opportunities and strategies of care. This book explores how individuals, groups and communities navigate uncertain and unequal healthcare systems, in which inherent moral judgements on human worth have long-lasting effects on people’s wellbeing. This is key reading for anyone wishing to deconstruct the issues at stake when analysing how care and chronicity are entangled with multiple institutional, economic, and other circumstantial factors. How people access the available informal and formal resources as well as how they react to official diagnoses and decisions are important facets of the management of chronicity. In the arena of care, people with chronic conditions find themselves negotiating restrictions and handling issues of power and (inter)dependency in relationships of inequality and proximity. This is particularly relevant in current times, when care has given in to the lure of the market, and the possibility of living a long and fulfilling life has been drastically reduced, transformed into a ‘reward’ for the few who have been deemed worthy of it.

Pentecostalism and Witchcraft

Pentecostalism and Witchcraft
Author: Knut Rio
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2017-10-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319560689

This open access book presents fresh ethnographic work from the regions of Africa and Melanesia—where the popularity of charismatic Christianity can be linked to a revival and transformation of witchcraft. The volume demonstrates how the Holy Spirit has become an adversary to the reconfirmed presence of witches, demons, and sorcerers as manifestations of evil. We learn how this is articulated in spiritual warfare, in crusades, and in healing or witch-killing raids. The contributors highlight what happens to phenomena that people address as locally specific witchcraft or sorcery when re-molded within the universalist Pentecostal demonology, vocabulary, and confrontational methodology.

A Precarious Game

A Precarious Game
Author: Ergin Bulut
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2020-03-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501746553

A Precarious Game is an ethnographic examination of video game production. The developers that Ergin Bulut researched for almost three years in a medium-sized studio in the U.S. loved making video games that millions play. Only some, however, can enjoy this dream job, which can be precarious and alienating for many others. That is, the passion of a predominantly white-male labor force relies on material inequalities involving the sacrificial labor of their families, unacknowledged work of precarious testers, and thousands of racialized and gendered workers in the Global South. A Precarious Game explores the politics of doing what one loves. In the context of work, passion and love imply freedom, participation, and choice, but in fact they accelerate self-exploitation and can impose emotional toxicity on other workers by forcing them to work endless hours. Bulut argues that such ludic discourses in the game industry disguise the racialized and gendered inequalities on which a profitable transnational industry thrives. Within capitalism, work is not just an economic matter, and the political nature of employment and love can still be undemocratic even when based on mutual consent. As Bulut demonstrates, rather than considering work simply as a matter of economics based on trade-offs in the workplace, we should consider the question of work and love as one of democracy rooted in politics.

Side@Ways: Mobile Margins and the Dynamics of Communication in Africa

Side@Ways: Mobile Margins and the Dynamics of Communication in Africa
Author: Mirjam de Bruijn
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2012-01-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9956728438

Marginality does not mean isolation. In Africa where people are permanently on the move in search, inter alia, of a better elsewhere, marginality means disconnection to obvious possibilities and the invisibility of the myriad connections that make life possible for the ordinarily sidestepped. This book is about the workings of networks of the mobile in Africa, a continent usually associated with the global shadows of the world. How do changes in the possibilities for communication, with the recent hype of mobile technology, influence the social and economic dynamics in Africas mobile margins? To what extent is the freedom associated with new Information and Communication Technologies reality or disillusion for people dwelling in the margins? Are ordinary Africans increasingly Side@Ways? How social are these emergent Side@Ways? Contributions to answering these and related questions are harvested from ethnographic insights by team members of the WOTRO funded Mobile Africa revisited research programme hosted by the African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Resilience of coastal systems and their human partners

Resilience of coastal systems and their human partners
Author: International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN)
Publisher: IUCN
Total Pages: 88
Release: 2015-07-09
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 2831717248

This report explains the ecology and social profile of coastal systems in Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania in order to contribute to the development of effective strategies to enhance the resilience of marine and coastal systems in the Western Indian Ocean. Special consideration is given to the effects and consequences of climate change and economic development.

Contemporary Perspectives on Religions in Africa and the African Diaspora

Contemporary Perspectives on Religions in Africa and the African Diaspora
Author: Carolyn M. Jones Medine
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 509
Release: 2015-10-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137498056

Contemporary Perspectives on Religions in Africa and the African Diaspora explores African derived religions in a globalized world. The volume focuses on the continent, on African identity in globalization, and on African religion in cultural change.