68 Marginality, Aspiration and Accessibility in ICTD Joyojeet Pal 1 , Tawfiq Ammari 1 , Ramaswami Mahalingam 1 , Ana Maria Huaita Alfaro 2 , Meera Lakshmanan 3 1 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 105 S. State St. Ann Arbor MI 41808 +1 734 764 1555 {joyojeet; tawfiqam; ramawasi @umich.edu} 2 University College London James Lighthill House 3 Penton Rise, London WC1X 9EN +44 207 8376704 amhuaita@pucp.pe 3 Independent Scholar Flat No.G8, Esteem Classic 147/A Rajajinagar, Bangalore 56022 +91 99455 62866 meeragargi@gmail.com ABSTRACT We present narratives around the use of Access Technology (AT) by 176 people with vision impairments in Peru, Jordan, and India. Respondents note changes in their economic and social aspirations following access to AT, but experience multiple forms of exclusion from the public sphere due to persistent negative social attitudes disability. We argue that building theoretical frames that examine the nature of marginality is an important direction for ICTD to better understand ways in which individuals appropriate technologies, and use them to change their social environment they exist in. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.3 [Human Factors] General Terms Design, Human Factors Keywords Access Technology, Assistive Technology, India, Peru, Jordan 1. ASPIRATION The DEV2012 sessions in Atlanta as a companion to ICTD2012 had a hotly debated topic on whether ICTs lead to an increase in human aspiration. In part, the debate was a reaction to critiques of technocentric approaches that have imagined ICT as being a vehicle of development rather than just a tool within a broader infrastructure. One of the key questions in the debate was whether individuals in the parts of the world where ICTD projects were active, were in fact aspiring for new things, and if so, whether this in itself could be considered a positive outcome. There are several ways to consider this debate. Aspiration itself is a complex phenomenon and the idea of its expansion could range from a relational sense of self-actualization [1], a cultural sense of place and agency [2] to a consumerist sense of aspiration for goods and services [3]. The association of technology with aspiration has likewise been examined from multiple frames. Ethnographic studies of transnationalism and technology have discussed ways in which the international aspirational landscapes have informed identity formation and online activity [4, 5], management studies have looked at it from a lens of entrepreneurial aspiration in the technology industry [6]. In ICTD venues, the past few years have seen a growth of work on aspiration as an important means of viewing peoples’ attitudes towards technology [7, 8] and proposed it as a means of creating a theoretical frame for ICTD as a whole [9]. ICTD assumes there is some form of marginalization – either in the physical terms of the individual user of a service or a technology artifact, or in the collective terms of an underserved community, which is so because of a systemic failure. Technology thus is an intervention to reconfigure that marginalization. The study of ‘marginalized communities’ as a subject of ICTD research has been a central part of much ICTD research, though the nature of marginality itself has received little attention. At the risk of flattening a fairly complex space, we can argue that there are two generally oppositional views on the role of the technological artifact in ICTD. At one end is a set of theories that argue that with the right contextual application, technology in itself profoundly changes the ability, both of individuals and of larger collectives such as nation states, to improve socio-economic conditions [10, 11]. These theories may not necessarily propose a form of technological determinism, but they abide by the fundamental and actionable positive potential of technology, which could, and should be harnessed to reduce or eliminate the elements of marginality. We refer to these as a ‘reconfigurist’ body of work wherein technology is seen as having the potential to profoundly reconfigure individual and collective capacities. On the other end of the spectrum are a group of works that suggest that technology does not have a transformative effect in the lives of people in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) by itself, rather that it acts as a mere amplifier, which only works as an additional tool that is layered over the elements of social ascendancy such as one’s access to social networks, education, geography etc. [12, 13]. In this view, technology is one amongst several other tools that can increase or decrease individuals’ abilities to act in a complex global system. We refer to this work as an ‘amplifier’ perspective. Indeed there are alternative perspectives, but these two important viewpoints have played an extremely central role in shaping the discourse in ICTD. As mostly oppositional positions, these two offer interesting vantage points for the examination of aspiration and marginalization, the two key constructs in our study of access technology use among people with vision impairments. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. ICTD 2013, December 07 - 10 2013, Cape Town, South Africa Copyright 2013 ACM 978-1-4503-1906-5/13/12…$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2516604.2516623