Recently I’ve been having quite a few conversations about social media where people are expressing quite a high level of scepticism. A common view is that we should be careful when promoting social media because not everyone has access to the necessary technology to use it.

There is a presumption held by many that a pluralist media system enables an open and free debate on political and social issues and a flow of  accurate news reporting. In countries that have recently …

Somewhere deep in the northern savannah there is an ideological clash that will affect the lives of the 5,000 inhabitants of Binaba for decades to come. Leninist collectivization meets autocracy in a system perhaps harking …

(UPDATE!  The continuing discussion in NYT has made me edit my post a bit.  Please note that I have specially erased references to the comment that I referred to as I know now a bit …

On Monday 12 October a very strange article appeared on the front page of the Guardian. Apparently the paper had been prevented by a legal injunction from reporting a question that was going to be …

Aurora Tellenbach, PhD in Arab Cinema here at SOAS, was kind and diligent enough to put a very long list of the films from the region of Africa and the Middle East.

At the Africa Gathering conference for the past couple of days. Interesting and inspirational talks as is usually the modus operandi of this community of technologists, entrepreneurs and more general world savers. I have always thought of these events a bit like church sermons – so I approach them as such. Less critical discussion but a lot of agreeing and being on the same side of solving problems. So what is often more interesting than the “meaning” of these events is to look at the machinic assemblages that are formed between the organizations spaces, people, technologies, desires, networks so on an so on.

During the past month I have been working on a pilot project in Ethiopia that combines two unusual bedfellows: mobiles phones and climate change. The idea has been to develop a system that would channel carbon sequestration funds to hundreds of thousands of rural farmers in Ethiopia in support of their reforestation efforts. A simple concept: more carbon tied to biomass through growing trees; more money produced. All of this would be then mediated by the mobile phone from data gathering to calculating biomass patterns to remuneration. This talk will present some of the problems and challenges the use of mobile phones raises in a country such as Ethiopia. It will look explain the current stage of the pilot project, describe some of the technical and political challenges we have encountered as well as extrapolate some broader theoretical implications of trying to leapfrog the digital divide through the use of mobile technology.

This is an ad campaign created for The History Channel by their advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, in particular for the South African market. The interesting things about this campaign is that it has garnered much reaction from people around the world deeming it as “anti-American” and “offensive”.

We have been tossing around a lot of theory this term, both in the Thursday group and in the many classes I have had the pleasure of having a role in. One question that is often asked: what use is all this complex theory and philosophy? That is, once you get into the messy world where you have to actually get things done, how do you then instrumentalize some of the ideas that we enjoy reading and debating? Why the extra headache?