ABSTRACT
This chapter responds positively to Akbari and Masiero’s (2023) call for a more Critical ICT4D. It argues that critical approaches to the use of ICT for Development have always existed within the ICT4D field, in proximate fields, and in ICT4D practice outside the academy. However, within the academic literature, critical approaches have been marginalised by modernisation theory, developmentalism, and concerns to drive technology adoption via techno-solutionism. I argue, therefore, that our task is not to create a new research paradigm from scratch but instead to bring existing critical, but currently marginalised, theory and practice “from the margins to the centre” (hooks, 2000) and to build together upon this already fertile ground.
This chapter ‘revisits the field’ by reflecting on three eras of ICT4D, reviewing the critical ICT4D literature and using auto-ethnography to reflect self-critically on the author’s 35 years of repeated errors and follies as an ICT4D practitioner and academic. Auto-ethnography allows the author to use personal experience to reflect on his own naïve White saviourism, techno-solutionism, and sell-out to funders, using this as a reflexive analysis to connect to wider failings and opportunities for the field of ICT4D. The paper charts the authors’ personal journey from a practitioner focused on ‘closing the digital divide’ via a phase devising savvy tech solutions to his current academic focus on digital rights and social justice. This process aims to learn lessons and to recover key elements of critical theory, a feminist approach, and epistemologies of the South in order to construct the basic elements of a Critical ICT4D.
