John Carr

Kiva.org, Person-to-Person Lending, and the Conditions of Intercultural Contact

Emerging groups such as Kiva International are using the Internet to make person-to-person microlending available by matching mostly First World lenders with Third World borrowers. This study analyzes 635 lender profile Web pages on Kiva.org to identify how Kiva International and its lenders imagine this intercultural, financial exchange through an analysis of discourses that lenders use in their lender profiles to describe their motivations for lending. This article first provides background on Kiva International and the role of the Internet in addressing power inequalities, and then explains the methodological approach. Next, we reveal the themes that emerged in our analysis of lender profiles, addressing the ways that neoliberal discourses of individualism and personal responsibility guide lenders’ motivations for participating in Kiva.orgs microlending process. Finally, we offer discussion and implications of this deployment of neoliberal discourse for intercultural communication, new media, and global financial exchanges, arguing that seemingly liberal and progressive Internet-discourses can perpetuate problematic neoliberal notions.

Kiva's Flat, Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit in Cyberspace

Abstract While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling development and empowering the poor, this form of ‘development from below’ does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, microcredit programs are inseperable from a host of neoliberal political, cultural, and economic practices and projects. These contexts are, however, systematically missing from Kiva.org, the largest and most popular peer-to-peer microlending portal. Instead, Kiva.org presents a placeless perspective on development and poverty, where borrowers’ skin color, native dress, and picturesque backgrounds seem to vary, but the ‘fix’ of microcredit remains universal. This ‘flat’ approach is problematic for two reasons. First, Kiva.org naturalizes the financialization of poor peoples disadvantage in the coercive form of debt. Second, lenders are encouraged to channel their desire to help alleviate poverty through Kiva.orgs lending portal based on an illusory sense of connection, transparency and beneficence in lending, thus potentially displacing other forms of less problematic development aid and intervention.

Hitting the moving target: challenges of creating a dynamic curriculum addressing the ethical dimensions of geospatial data

While established ethical norms and core legal principles concerning the protection of privacy may be easily identified, applying these standards to rapidly evolving digital information technologies, markets for digital information and convulsive changes in social understandings of privacy is increasingly challenging. This challenge has been further heightened by the increasing creation of, access to, and sophisticated nature of geocoded data, that is, data that contain time and global location components. This article traces the growing need for, and the structural challenges to creating educational curricula that address the ethical and privacy dimensions of geospatial data.

Introduction: towards a methodology for teaching the ethics of geocoded data privacy

The increasing prevalence, granularity and sophistication of quantitative data that include locational content have been accompanied by a similar rise in public awareness and concern about such data. Once the exclusive purview of geographers and a limited cohort of social scientists and professionals, such “geocoded data” have become a matter of increasing public concern. Whether manifested in the form of protests against Google “Street View” cars entering communities, worries about the violations of privacy made possible by private and military drones, or outrage over recent revelations about the National Security Administration’s systematic gathering of information about U.S. citizens and foreign nationals, there is a groundswell of concerns about how increasingly powerful and potentially useful tools for gathering, sharing, and analyzing data with locational content may produce negative consequences as well. And for educators whose pedagogy touches on the creation or analysis of such “geocoded data,” it is increasingly difficult to overlook the ways that real-world problems continue to attach to the activities of geographers and other academics and professionals who deal with geocoded data. The purpose of this Symposium is twofold. First, we hope to use the following articles not only to address how one might go about shaping a pedagogy that effectively addresses the potentially harmful consequences of geocoded data, but also to start to explain why these potentially harmful consequences are relevant for all geographers. Because all of us are subjects of locational data – even if we are not directly involved in producing, sharing, or analyzing that data – questions of geocoded data ethics and privacy are already a personal matter for ourselves and our students. Accordingly, we offer the works collected here as an entry point for thinking through what ramifications these forms of data and associated technologies may have for our teaching and our personal practices. Second, for those who are interested in teaching, or are already teaching the ethical and privacy dimensions of geocoded data, we offer the beginnings of a research and pedagogical agenda along with some directions forward for methodology and evaluation. Our project, however, is premised on the argument that taking geocoded data privacy and ethics seriously requires the educator to look beyond the discipline of geography and the well-

The Scales of Justice: Federal-Local Tensions in the War on Terror

Recently, the city of Portland, Oregon, found itself willing to just say no to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). After eight years of participation with the FBI in a joint task force to investigate residents suspected of plotting terrorist acts, the city decided to withdraw. The task force was an example of a federal-local law-enforcement partnership that is now quite common in the United States, especially in the age of heightened concern about terrorism. Such partnerships bring together the investigatory expertise of federal agencies with the local knowledge of city or county law enforcement.