Kavita Philip

Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development

As our technologies travel to new cultural contexts and our designs and methods engage new constituencies, both our design and analytical practices face significant challenges. We offer postcolonial computing as an analytical orientation to better understand these challenges. This analytic orientation inspires four key shifts in our approach to HCI4D efforts: generative models of culture, development as a historical program, uneven economic relations, and cultural epistemologies. Then, through reconsideration of the practices of engagement, articulation and translation in other contexts, we offer designers and researchers ways of understanding use and design practice to respond to global connectivity and movement.

Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey

The authors suggest that postcolonial science studies can do more than expand answers to questions already posed; it can generate different questions and different ways of looking at the world. To illustrate, the authors draw on existing histories and anthropologies and critical theories of colonial and postcolonial technoscience. To move forward together, rather than remaining mired in regretful contemplation of past biases, the authors offer some analytical and practical suggestions. In reading hegemonic forms of postcolonial computing, this article offers tactics for rereading, rewriting, or reimagining those scripts.

Software reuse through methodical component reuse and amethodical snippet remixing

Every method for developing software is a prescriptive model. Applying a deconstructionist analysis to methods reveals that there are two texts, or sets of assumptions and ideals: a set that is privileged by the method and a second set that is left out, or marginalized by the method. We apply this analytical lens to software reuse, a technique in software development that seeks to expedite ones own project by using programming artifacts created by others. By analyzing the methods prescribed by Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE), we arrive at two texts: Methodical CBSE and Amethodical Remixing. Empirical data from four studies on code search on the web draws attention to four key points of tension: status of component boundaries; provenance of source code; planning and process; and evaluation criteria for candidate code. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the implications of this work for the limits of methods, structure of organizations that reuse software, and the design of search engines for source code.

Telling histories of the future: the imaginaries of Indian technoscience

When, in 1947, India became independent, its archetypal citizen-subject was the farmer; 60 years later it was the software engineer. Increasingly central, rather than marginal, in global economic networks, India’s popular image at the beginning of the twenty-first century is of a postcolonial nation that has successfully used technology to leapfrog over its historical legacy of underdevelopment. This shift in ideal citizen archetypes, from farmer to digital entrepreneur, has brought with it new assumptions about the role of information technology in shaping citizenly behaviour and nationalist subjectivity. This paper reads the contradictory aesthetics of this arrival by interrogating popular technological tropes.

Post-colonial historiography and the polemicist's task: understanding Perry Anderson's Indian Ideology

In three articles in the London Review of Books (LRB), Marxist historian Perry Anderson presented a sweeping, synoptic polemic on modern India. Re-cast as extensively footnoted chapters entitled ‘Independence’, ‘Partition’ and ‘Republic’, with a new introduction framing the work as part of a longer ongoing project on ‘the emergent inter-state system of the leading powers of the time’, these now comprise The Indian Ideology (2012, 2013). Anderson notes that his title echoes Karl Marx’s term for the Hegelian-nationalist form of mid-nineteenth-century German idealism – the ‘German Ideology’. As with Marx and Engels’s work of this name, Anderson’s book is motivated by a deep concern for the shape of the future, articulated through the interweaving of historiography and politics. The Indian Ideology seeks to unmask the roots of India’s failings. Anderson collates a dismal record for this sixty-five-year-old state. Pakistan’s compromised conditions of birth resulted from Indian nationalists’ collusion with British imperialists. Human rights abuses and extra-judicial killings plague India’s north-east, and Kashmir. Genocidal violence terrorizes Muslim citizens. Upper-caste Hindu violence assails Dalits. And a dynastic party at the centre exercises an illegitimate hegemony over the world’s largest democracy. Anderson attributes these dysfunctional aspects of post-independence Indian modernity to an ideological nationalism that grips the nation’s politicians and intellectuals. India, like Ireland, he believes, erroneously failed to separate religion from politics; the resulting religious violence marks its modernity with a founding contradiction (4). This historical failure is exacerbated by India’s mainstream public

The work of software development as an assemblage of computational practice

Science and technology studies (STS) is a discipline concerned with examining how social and technological worlds shape each other. In this paper, we argue that STS can be used to study the work of software development as a complex, interacting system of people, organizations, culture, practices, and technology, or in STS terms, an assemblage. We illustrate the application of these ideas to the work of software development, where STS theory directs us towards examining at human-human relations, human-machine relations, and machine-machine relations. We conclude by discussing some of the challenges of applying STS in empirical software engineering.

The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (review)

its aft ermath remain the crucial turning point for these writers as they negotiate and attempt to survive its repercussions on them as women and on the larger civil society. Another dimension that is apparent in both collections is the unprecedented representation of children in war zones. In the Palestinian short story “Th e Letter,” by Laila al-Atrash, we see a child develop a crush on a woman only to despair at seeing her blood spilled. In the Lebanese story “Th e Language of the Secret,” by Najwa Barakat, a young boy runs away from the burdens of responsibility as a provider for his mother during the war, to embark on a mysterious religious quest. We fi nd stories like “Chat,” by Hoda Barakat, about Lebanese children of the diaspora chatting on the Internet in their own language codes—which they prefer to speaking in Arabic—in order to communicate with other children around the world; while yet other children, as in “Name-calling,” by Evelyn Shakir, yearn to be heard by their own fathers. Both collections off er a glossary of colloquial Palestinian and Lebanese words. Unfortunately, there are inconsistencies in transliteration within and among the stories in each volume, which may confuse the reader who is unfamiliar with Arabic. Nevertheless, these anthologies are a treasure for Western readers who want to familiarize themselves with the complexities of both Lebanese and Palestinian societies as war zones. Th e stories also constitute an excellent resource for teachers who are struggling to fi nd material that is not one-dimensional in its presentation of Arab women.