Maria Udén

Technology producers meeting indigenous users: the case of Sami network connectivity

In this paper we use the case of an internet connectivity project in Scandinavia, Sami Network Connectivity (SNC), as a means to investigate the impulses which designing a network for a semi nomadic population, gives to network design, and to policy making. Thus, we regard the diffusion of innovations as something, which affects not only the culture of technology users but also that of technology producers. Manuel Castells argues that the cultural heritage imprinted in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sectors technical design and social organisation has developed as a result of interaction between large, hierarchical institutions on the one hand and the radical thinking of the 1960s on the other and. The conceptual congruence between internet experts and the user community displayed in SNC may so be explained. We suggest that due to discourses that surrounded senior ICT professionals during their youth, there is a preparation for a nomadic scenario within the ICT sector as such.

Women, reindeer herding and the Internet: an innovative process in northern Sweden

This research note deals with an innovation initiative involving women, reindeer herding and the Internet. It shows how women reindeer herders from a Swedish Sámi village were a driving force in the development of several innovative, EU-funded projects focusing on information and communications technology. The article shows how the innovation initiative involved a wide range of actors, ascribing stakeholders from civil society important roles besides the public and private sectors. The innovation initiative involved several different strategies. One of these strategies was internationalization – both at the European and worldwide levels. This strategy was employed to prevent rigid political hierarchies blocking the prospects of gaining support from local and regional authorities. Another strategy was the continuous exchange of knowledge between engineers and potential end users, adapting the initiative results to the needs of the local context. As a result, the innovation initiative has produced several kinds of outcomes. It has generated new technology as well as economic and social benefits.

Implementing feminist theory in engineering: obstacles within the gender studies tradition

ABSTRACT Scholars have noted that there is hesitation to utilise findings from gender studies in engineering education. Issues within gender studies may be part of the matching problem. Debates concerning two concepts for new engineering paradigms are investigated: care and heterogeneity. Their appeals and the respective complications which they tend to be associated with are revisited. Two examples are explored in detail. The tensions revealed lead to the contents of technical work. More social sciences content in engineering education is sometimes suggested, as a way to support more humane approaches. But, if the calculations that decide how many bolts of what dimension are to be put where are ‘masculinist reductionism’, it still remains that someone will have to do those calculations. Is emphasis on social issues really what we want from engineers?

Deploying an 'Out of Space' Technology: A Case Study of Non-Human Resistance

This study investigates how environments into which new technologies are introduced interact and interfere with the deployment process, the deployed technologies as well as the research conducted. The material that is used in this study draws from the N4C project development and deployment of Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) technology in the remote Arctic villages of Ritsem and Staloluokta. As the development of DTN technology prior to the deployment was conducted primarily in the laboratories, its usability and functionality still needed to be proven on the field of deployment. Here, Actor Network Theory (ANT) was employed to reveal how climate, flora, fauna and other elements present in the field of deployment interacted and interfered with, but more importantly, drove the technological development and the continued research work.

Women, the Knowledge Society and ICT Access in the Reindeer Grazing Areas

This paper is about inclusion in the prosperous “winner” networks and practices, caught by the term “knowledge society”. It tells about some people and a location in the Arctic rims of the European Union. The process presented can be described as enacted ambitions for knowledge society inclusion. Among the people involved there have been researchers and professionals of several different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds. But, the Sámi, as represented by the local community engaged in the process, are central. The case study started with affirmative action for Sámi women in Jokkmokk, northwest Sweden, and ended up in future Internet research on a European arena. The Sámi is an indigenous people of northern Scandinavia and northwest Russia. As several of the Sámi groups, the Sámi in this Jokkmokk case study are semi-nomadic reindeer herders. Living and travelling in remote areas, where reliable telecom or broadband are not at hand, their situation as business owners and as citizens is strained. This happens at the same time as a public discourse says that we now have access anywhere and at any time. A basic assumption in this paper is that increased scale and quality of inclusion in the knowledge society is a sensible goal for promoting the general economic development of a society as well as for those who are, at start, marginal.

Book Review: Gendered mobility

on structured complexity rather than unicausal explanations. One of the important contributions of such historical studies has been to show how, since the early modern period, women of the rising middle-class sought to control their wellfounded fears of childbirth by turning to science as a means to control the danger associated with birth, thus deserting the traditional birth assistance well-placed women previously had shared with other women (e.g. Leavitt 1986; Wilson 1995). Circumstances in the Nordic countries differ from those in the United States or Britain. Nevertheless, the important differences among the Nordic countries when it comes, for instance, to the pace of the formalization of maternity care also suggest that the medical discourse or its institutionalization within the state cannot be singled out as explanations. Above all, it is possible that the role of the state will come to be seen as too monolithic. Maternity care constituted one of the institutional links between central power and local society through which modern government of private lives was made possible. The emergence of such government was a complex, cultural process for which medical science provided a vehicle, and sometimes a catalyst. Romlid’s perspective also leaves little room to consider the relevance of, for instance, the wider Swedish bourgeois public sphere and its nationalist project for the emergence of modern maternity care. In conclusion, in my mind, Romlid could have given more consideration to the cultural dimensions of the changes in childbirth and related them to the process of modernization, in which men and women – not only physicians and midwives – participated, allied and divided themselves in different ways. Childbirth assistance is one of the phenomena that has been transformed through social change. Christina Romlid has provided us some of the answers to the question of how this happened. By doing this, as always in good research, she has led us to new questions that remain to be examined. REFERENCES Leavitt, Judith Walzer. 1986. Brought to bed: Childbearing in America, 1750–1950. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Adrian. 1995. The making of man-midwifery. childbirth in England, 1660–1770. London: UCL Press.