In a seminal piece of work, Arturo Escobar has called upon academics and practitioners to look beyond modernity’s universalising tendencies that tend to homogenise or erase cultural difference. He argues that an alternative and more just possibility involves a focus on place-based communities and knowledge systems.  In this talk I take inspiration from Escobar’s call to think about alternative futures in the context, content and capabilities of technological innovation. To do so, I draw upon research in different global sites to highlight the role of technologies in creating connection and disconnection across cultures. First, the context of innovation emerges via a focus upon how a transnational telecommunications company began to interpret and misinterpret culture in their quest gain access to new mobile phone markets in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  I then explore how technological content is created and interpreted via the use of a new consumer device that uses algorithms and machine learning to make recommendations about what to wear, with particular attention to the missteps the device made in making recommendations for different social and ethnic communities in the US and the Caribbean. The third and final example of capabilities explores the ways in which technological innovation in digital printing has enabled new forms of multicultural connection and belonging via a clothing practice known as kalavata in Fiji and the Pacific region. Taken together, I highlight how recognition of these diverse worlds of technology use and innovation can make space for greater intercultural dialog and connection that, in turn, enable new possibilities creating worlds filled with diverse experiences, perspectives and cultures.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Heather A. Horst is Professor of Design Anthropology at the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney, Australia and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, she researches material culture, mobility, and the mediation of social relations, through the study of homes, clothing, and technology.

Her publications include The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication; Hanging Around, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media; Digital Anthropology; Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practices; The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones: Pacific Island Perspectives; and Digital Media Practices in Households. She is also the Executive Producer of documentary films on smartphones and parenting in Fiji, mobile phone infrastructures in Papua New Guinea, and a forthcoming film on the relationship between Indigenous and international fashion design in contemporary Fiji.