You are not here: coordinating repair under occupation

Presented by Assistant Professor Alissa Centivany, Faculty of Information and Media Studies.

All are welcome. Part of the FIMS Seminar Series 2024/25.

Attend in-person: FNB 4130
Attend virtually: Register on Zoom

Abstract: This research challenges dominant understandings of ubiquity, mobility, and connectivity and explores the limits ICTs through a qualitative study of a collaborative capacity‐building initiative to localize the repair of medical devices and equipment in the Gaza Strip. Dominant perceptions of ICT affordances rely upon taken‐for‐granted political, economic, and social systems that are neither universal nor guaranteed. Using a thickly descriptive, interpretivist approach, this research shows how ICTs are fundamentally insufficient to support team collaboration and meet the affective and material requisites of collaborative work under conditions of occupation. Digital networked technologies are particularly limited in their ability to create, simulate, and/or foster the interdependent conditions of presence, flow, and coordination required for cooperative work to succeed. Geopolitical borders and concomitant conditions of occupation continuously disrupt the logics of time and space between those living and working in Gaza and the “outside world”. Arbitrary and capricious fluctuations in tolerance, temporality, persistence, and permeability wrought by the ongoing siege of Gaza result in pernicious harms that are difficult or impossible to account for or correct with technical “solutions.”