Urbana Campus Research Calendar (OVCRI)

My presentation focuses on how trust, labor, and power shape digital policy and socioeconomic inequality. Discussing findings from my dissertation, I examine how a policy program asymmetrically produces value for public institutions, tech firms, and small business. Drawing on 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including nearly 100 interviews, focus groups, multimodal discourse analysis, and a survey experiment (N=176)—I show how state-driven SME digitalization is predominantly shaped by the trust, accountability, and hierarchies forged between tech-wary SME leaders and temporary government contractors. These contractors negotiate digitalization’s contested value, navigating tensions between SMEs, tech-firms, workers, publics, and the state around capital and data extraction, infrastructural dependency, accountability, surveillance, and data sovereignty. My findings contribute to debates on tech policy and emerging digital cultures in Latin America and the Global South by revealing how social capital articulates with the burgeoning affordances of digital technology to critically affect the dynamics of state-sponsored digitalization. 

Please feel free to bring a brown bag lunch!