ICTs for Power/Empowerment?: Negotiating Narratives across the Local and Global
Cari Beth Head · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 2012
This thesis examines the nature of women's empowerment through information and communication technologies in the context of international development (ICT4D).It builds on the growing breadth and depth of existing ICT4D research that seeks to understand women's access to, usage of, and benefit from ICTs.In adding to this body of knowledge, it works from a feminist political economy perspective to contextualize individual and local-level definitions and experiences of ICT-enabled empowerment, in terms of global questions of political and economic structures of power.Utilizing a critical discourse analysis methodology, it reviews discourses of empowerment, ICT, and the information society at three levels: a single Ugandan women's organization, the organization's primary funder, and an international multilateral organization.At each level, it outlines key discourses in use, and attempts to reveal the dynamics between them.Ultimately, it serves to highlight the powerful role of discourse in the field of ICT4D, and the specific ways in which discourses might act to both sustain and subvert existing structures of political and economic power.