Women and the Spatial Politics of Community Networks
Nicola J. Bidwell · 2019
Community Networks (CNs) offer many positive impacts for rural inhabitants of low-income regions beyond cheap communications, including different benefits to local economies, social welfare and personal well-being. However, spatial politics compromise diverse inclusion in these benefits by rendering women invisible when the wireless technologies used by CNs are designed, deployed and referred to in discussions about regulation. I support this claim by drawing together insights from multiple case research of rural CNs in India, Indonesia, Argentina Mexico, South Africa and Uganda, and my engagement with activists advocating for CNs. The spatial politics shaping debates about spectrum regulation, and the wireless technologies to which they apply, are at different scales than women in rural villages experience. Gendered spatial politics perform orthogonally across all scales and dimensions to constrain women's proximal access to WiFi, capacity to learn about and undertake technical tasks and involvement in decisions about CNs; however, advocacy for CNs works across vast geographies.