Communication, Culture & Critique ISSN 1753-9129 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Emancipatory Broadband Adoption: Toward a Critical Theory of Digital Inequality in the Urban United States Todd Wolfson 1 , Jessica Crowell 1 , Camille Reyes 2 , & Amy Bach 3 1 Journalism and Media Studies Department, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA 2 Department of Communiucation, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212, USA 3 College of Education, University of Texas-El Paso, El Paso, TX 79902, USA Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic research that included an engaged participant com- ponent, this article seeks to build a critical theory of technology adoption in urban com- munities. While the high cost of broadband Internet is undeniably an obstacle to adoption, we argue that solving the problem of cost is a necessary but not suicient solution to the digital divide. To this end, the article contends that a community’s relationship to commu- nication technology—and their ability to see it as a political and cultural tool that can be utilized not just instrumentally, but more broadly as a way to ight poverty, inequality, and other forms of oppression—is a substantial factor leading to what we call emancipatory adoption. Keywords: Digital Divide, Broadband Adoption, Collective Identity, Urban Crisis, Postcolonial Studies. doi:10.1111/cccr.12166 On a Saturday morning in April of 2013, 30 low-wage workers, immigrants, teach- ers, and cab drivers from across Philadelphia attended the second session of a 3-day Media Institute (MI) held by Media Mobilizing Project (MMP). Across the span of 6 hours, students discussed the growing battle around public education in Philadel- phia, learned about efective storytelling strategies through video and social media, and then broke into groups and were trained in the basics of Facebook, Twitter, and MMP’s text messaging program, Switchboard. he goal of this session was to exam- ine the ways that the seemingly disparate struggles of poor and working people are connected, while training attendees on ways to harness digital storytelling and social media to build community power. Alongside these primary goals, MMP also aimed to enhance the capacity and desire of students to adopt the Internet, by helping them Corresponding author: Todd Wolfson; e-mail: twolfson@rci.rutgers.edu Communication, Culture & Critique (2017) © 2017 International Communication Association 1