DSOC 2080: Technology, Society, and Development
Taught: Cornell University, Fall 2011
This course offers a set of alternative, sociological ways to think about the multiple relationships between technology, society, and development. Often, technology is conceived of as a “thing” that is deployed, delivered, or transferred from more “advanced” societies to less “developed” ones in order to aid in their economic, social, cultural, political, or ecological betterment. In this vision, technology is imagined as a simple tool that embodies a set of solutions to a set of fixable problems. In this course, we will complicate this vision. Through an exploration of both the historical and contemporary roles of technology in development, we will reconceptualize technology not just as a “thing,” but rather as a set of social relations. As such, we will rethink many of the classic issues related to technology and development—transfer, innovation, progress—as fundamentally embedded in relations of power, capital, expertise, and regulation.
What does this mean for students taking this course? The goal of this class is not to celebrate the uses of technology in development, to identify the technologies that are most likely to “succeed” in developing countries, or to simplistically deride all technological interventions in development as tools of empire. Rather, it is to unsettle assumptions about the relationships between progress, society, and technical expertise. In doing so, we will rethink new and classic technologies of development from a historical and critical standpoint that situates “change” within a network of competing interests, idealized notions, and messy realities “on the ground.”
This course is organized into five sections. We will begin by outlining some basic terms for our discussion that will be critical throughout our discussions of progress, expertise, and development. We will then explore the roots of contemporary development and its uses of technology in eighteenth and nineteenth century imperialism. Specifically, we will explore: the rhetoric of progress, the uses of new and emerging technological innovations to control and order populations, and the vagaries of using such tools to shape imperial space. We will then look at the links between the “age of empire” and the “age of development” through an exploration of the debates around one of the great development projects of the post-war period: the Green Revolution. We will then move into a space where you, the students, will identify several specific questions linked to technology, society, and development that you would like to explore in more depth. These student-driven weeks will form the basis for your final projects. Finally, we will conclude by exploring interventions and re-appropriations that turn technology, progress, and development on their heads. We will explore the ways that development is not the transmission of new technology to passive subjects, but rather an active set of relationships that are transformed and made anew in practice.
Overall, this course will not (and cannot) offer a comprehensive survey of important uses of technology in development, nor will it make a case for the use of one strategy of transfer or implementation over others. Rather, it will challenge students to approach such questions from a more grounded, historical, and sociological perspective that sees technology, development, and society as a set of complicated and interrelated processes in need of critical and empirical analysis
This course offers a set of alternative, sociological ways to think about the multiple relationships between technology, society, and development. Often, technology is conceived of as a “thing” that is deployed, delivered, or transferred from more “advanced” societies to less “developed” ones in order to aid in their economic, social, cultural, political, or ecological betterment. In this vision, technology is imagined as a simple tool that embodies a set of solutions to a set of fixable problems. In this course, we will complicate this vision. Through an exploration of both the historical and contemporary roles of technology in development, we will reconceptualize technology not just as a “thing,” but rather as a set of social relations. As such, we will rethink many of the classic issues related to technology and development—transfer, innovation, progress—as fundamentally embedded in relations of power, capital, expertise, and regulation.
What does this mean for students taking this course? The goal of this class is not to celebrate the uses of technology in development, to identify the technologies that are most likely to “succeed” in developing countries, or to simplistically deride all technological interventions in development as tools of empire. Rather, it is to unsettle assumptions about the relationships between progress, society, and technical expertise. In doing so, we will rethink new and classic technologies of development from a historical and critical standpoint that situates “change” within a network of competing interests, idealized notions, and messy realities “on the ground.”
This course is organized into five sections. We will begin by outlining some basic terms for our discussion that will be critical throughout our discussions of progress, expertise, and development. We will then explore the roots of contemporary development and its uses of technology in eighteenth and nineteenth century imperialism. Specifically, we will explore: the rhetoric of progress, the uses of new and emerging technological innovations to control and order populations, and the vagaries of using such tools to shape imperial space. We will then look at the links between the “age of empire” and the “age of development” through an exploration of the debates around one of the great development projects of the post-war period: the Green Revolution. We will then move into a space where you, the students, will identify several specific questions linked to technology, society, and development that you would like to explore in more depth. These student-driven weeks will form the basis for your final projects. Finally, we will conclude by exploring interventions and re-appropriations that turn technology, progress, and development on their heads. We will explore the ways that development is not the transmission of new technology to passive subjects, but rather an active set of relationships that are transformed and made anew in practice.
Overall, this course will not (and cannot) offer a comprehensive survey of important uses of technology in development, nor will it make a case for the use of one strategy of transfer or implementation over others. Rather, it will challenge students to approach such questions from a more grounded, historical, and sociological perspective that sees technology, development, and society as a set of complicated and interrelated processes in need of critical and empirical analysis