Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Subaltern empowerment, socio-economic globalization and digital divides

1. Producing the Global: Microfinance Online
with Franklin Yartey and Anca Birzescu

2. Philanthrophist or Investor? Microlending to the Other
with Anca Birzescu, Franklin Yartey

3. Snapshots from Sari Trails, Cyborgs Old and New
with rad Zabibha

4. Framing the Loom: An Indian Context
with Seemanthani Niranjani and B. Syamasundari

5. Kente Cloth and Adinkra in the Global Market
Precious Yamaguchi and Franklin Yartey

Conclusion: Multiple interfacings with the so-called subaltern: To be continued

Key Concepts and Terms
References
Index
About the Author
Contributor Bios

As I said the other day on my Facebook status update.

There is method to my madness even if it looks more like madness to my method.

(but really that’s just the point isn’t it – method does not just happen. its carved out ofmadness).

So now I’m struggling through knitting. My UFO s now include knitting, quilt patches, weaving and crochet…

Thinking through issues of value, labor, affect…

[for citation details - email me]

CHAPTER SIX

CONCLUSION
or
Changes, Transitions, Upgrading, Rewriting… what stayed constant if anything?

I started work on this book during a post dot.com socio-economic era soon after I had completed my last book. The last book (Gajjala, 2004) to be based fully on my own research endeavours and collaborations drew on the work I’d done both for my dissertation and towards tenure, during the mid to late 90s. In the midst of that book project and this current one (and I anticipate the same for the next one I am embarking on as I shut the covers on this one) – shifts have occurred. These shifts have reaffirmed for me that what I was observing at these cross-sections are indeed impacting our presents and futures in ways that compel us to re-seat ourselves from disciplinary comfort zones. What is discussed in this book that you are reading the “conclusion” of, for instance, does not just impact our social and cultural lives as if those were separate from political and the economic. These online/offline intersections are changing the way we need to respond to situations around us – whether in our domestic everyday or in the world-wide political milieu. What is most compelling is not that there are shifts or there is change – these are givens in any era. Our urgent attention and reflexive engagement is needed to observe carefully how this so-called speed of change allows a loss of memory that permits status quo hierarchies to be unchanged generation after generation. While bodies and cultural objects are coded as interchangeable and made visible as agents of difference, democracy and multiculturalism – code is standardized and these individual agents of so-called change are placed on naturalized technical platforms. Code is made invisible. Does this mean that the cod-ers – the labor that codes – have the power? Does this mean that the complex literacies involved in producing the platforms and networks are created by the labor-force that codes them? What configurations of practices, literacies and assumptions underpin how this labor force is trained and simultaneously rendered powerless while they labor to produce “us” in the interface?

Should the Humanities and Social Sciences be left out of these kinds of inter-disciplinary practices of standardizing socio-cultural financial code named as “technical” and “Technology,” as we continue incestuously “blind” peer-reviewing each other’s work, gatekeeping to ensure there is not more than a bit of fashionable dissonance and multiplicity in voicing – as we maintain outdated hierarchies of knowledge-production?
In continuing work my call to fellow researchers is to scrutinize closely every practice, every code, every interface, woven designs, crochet patterns, spoken word – for what seams seamless. We have been looking at and reveling in the discovery of “ruptures” and celebrating them or pointing to them as evidence of hopeful change. But we are missing what hides in the background of the ruptures we see “popping up.” What are the non-changing factors that are hidden by the fast appearing manner in which the “newness” of the place/space/time/body intersections seem to have the potential for reproducing “old” oppressive regimes in brand new bytes great speed and less time for reflection and contemplation.
How do we “upgrade” the lens that sees – what do we look for and why. How is an “unscripted entry” (here I refer to a recent podcast interview of Larry Gross where he talks about the unscripted entry of Justin Beiber and the likes into the mainstream) into the mainstream actually a product of status quo production mechanisms that have shifted and been hidden through the continual and simultaneous upgrading and standardization of layers of access and literacy. What do we write and publish for and why – if we reproduce consistencies in the name of discovery of newness?

At least with a reporter – there are what seem to be guidelines established through years of practice (by reporters and related administrators) and rule-making around news-making and reporting. When a reporter meets us f2f for a story or is going to be amidst us in a public venue we are aware that we will likely be “reported” on.

But what of the daily blogger – what are the warning signs for someone who is going to be written about in a blog? What are power dynamics at play – when a high ranking academic blogs vs when a graduate student blogs – what social capital permits the blogging of certain events (bloggers are hardly ever about stating multiple perspectives – they state their own and those of their friends – just as I do – not that reporters are objective necessarily either but there are other checks and balances…)

I have so many recent events happening around me and that I have been a part of that I want to report on and comment on on my blog – but hesitate because I feel that my view on some of these events will not be taken too kindly …

This is not an issue of marginalization and empowerment – it is an issue of judgement and viewership.

Specific situated audience communities interacting with Writers produce “texts” – but where the blog goes – we cant always map the route.

but I may blog the reports eventually anyway.

to find out more about what it means to “quilt conceptually” according to rad Zabibha (born in 2006) and Cyb Tabla (born in 2004)

go to http://slurl.com/secondlife/Brouwer/172/149/42

work in-progress – always

considering also linking to Diva’s earlier moo projects – at least those that are still accessible

The archives aren’t updated yet – but when they do you can find the discussion…

Meanwhile – cutting and pasting a part of my most recent post to invite anyone in-world to IM me to be a part of the group I am forming.

THIS discussion is to me about SL education and how we as educators can use these tools (if we must) responsibly and to explore if this medium is indeed enhancing or hampering our ability to pedagogically negotiate the complexities of representational practices world wide. When are we as educators part of the solution and when do we become part of the problem?

I am starting a group on SL on the politics of representation and pedagogy – anyone interested should IM me inworld – rad Zabibha.

This fall I teach a course on Pedagogy at the grad level and hope to have them participate in an SL based assignment that will include this group and discussions with them. Therefore the group is about more than “SLED” – it is about Pedagogy and representational practices.

Finally. A moment to write. To quickly swiftly wiggle my fingers over the keyboard. When I took this job – did I think it would slow down my writing and research? Yes I was warned. But I also knew that if I did not write I would stop breathing…. So I cannot stop writing.

But I stop to think – is it because of the busy schedule of being Graduate Coordinator that stops me from writing in response to Adrienne’s call that we start to focus on disruption of family secrets – or is it – yet again – my mind refusing to reveal secrets to my typing fingers?

This morning as I chugged away on the exercise machines – first running on the treadmill and then moving on the elliptical runner – with my ipod trinket playing in my ears, my mind seeking out words of wisdom, some sign perhaps from all the songs I’ve heard many times before over and over again. Hoping for the random shuffling of the songs to talk to me – knowing I have embedded my father’s voice and his poem for my mother in the midst of a medley of old and new bollywood songs, South Indian and North India classical music, Western Classical music, a bit of remix and desi rap as well as some other mixed music from the 80s and 90s…. Every morning its pretty much the same – I seek to get a sign from all these technologies I use. Perhaps this is the root of my fascination with technologies – they are my modern day spirits. Like Samantha in Bewitched and Jeannie in I dream of Jeannie – I will twitch my nose or blink my eyes and my family and friends will teleport towards me – converse with me, laugh with me and give me words of wisdom or sarcasm to live and laugh by….

So I entered second life again and clicked something and found myself on a boat with a guy who was cursing about lag…

“Hello” he said

he said….

Dorothy is not in Kansas anymore, I thought.

Darn those English metaphors again

But I am writing in English … .my audience wont get my linguistic twists and metaphors from another language and context – and if I tried to explain they would be no fun any more…

Yes that is why I disappear into techno-spaces. That is why I am so aware of technologies – for you, my audience, here and now are the technologies shaping me and speaking to me and giving me a “sign” –that I must interpret as either validation or rejection or neither through my own lenses of understanding and affect…

You sit around me… and I think – what are my secrets today?

I click on your profile button – but it tells me nothing I want to know

I set my profile button – to tell you nothing you need not know

But we must establish some bonds of trust if we are to write together like this….

So I will start my narration….