- Trial lecture starts at 10:15
- Public defence starts at 12:15
Title of trial lecture: TBA
Read the thesis in NVA
Disputation chair: Dean Leif Skiftenes Flak
Assessment committee:
- Dr. Yingqin Zheng, University of Essex
- Professor Stan Karanasios, University of Queensland
- Professor Margunn Aanestad, UIA/UIO
Supervisors in the doctoral work:
- Professor Devendra Bahadur Thapa, UiA
- Professor Øystein Sæbø, UiA
Summary of thesis
Smart rural development has emerged as an approach to development challenges encountered by people and communities living in rural areas. This emerging approach to rural development is manifested both in the Global South and the Global North through initiatives such as smart villages, smart farming, smart technology hubs and smart rural tourism. The shared goal of these initiatives is to exploit the potential of digital technologies to transform rural areas into sites of innovation knowledge generation.
Within this broad focus on smart rural development, my study is primarily concerned with the institutional and aspirational dimensions underlying smart rural development. Specifically, I follow a critical research approach and an interpretive case study design to first examine the institutional processes that give rise to certain dominant visions of rural smartness and that consequently generate problematic outcomes such as aggravation of inequalities. Then building upon these critical insights, I attempt to develop an alternative vision of rural smartness that is based on community aspirations.
In doing so, my main motivation is to problematize an instrumental approach to sociotechnical analysis that has dominated the research of smart rural development so far. This instrumental approach has focused the attention of scholars to generate knowledge about how to improve technological features of digital artefacts and how to increase the adoption of these artefacts in rural contexts. Consequently, the view overlooks multiple dimensions and levels constituting a sociotechnical perspective of smart rural development.
The main contribution of the study is, therefore, to enrich existing sociotechnical analysis of smart rural development, and by extension, smart rural initiatives. This is achieved by attending, revealing, critiquing and reconceptualizing the institutional and aspirational dimensions of smart rural development. Similarly, the study makes important contributions to topics within Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) research such as development visions, Rural information systems initiatives and ICTs & aspirations. In addition, it also outlines some practical implications. It encourages powerful actors to be more responsible towards the worldviews of community actors. And it recommends relevant development actors to invest resources and efforts to help enhance the aspirational capacities of community actors in developing digital initiatives.
What to do as an online audience member
The disputation is open to the public. To follow the trial lecture and the public defence online, register on Zoom.
We ask online audience members to join no earlier than 10 minutes in advance. After these times, you can leave and rejoin the meeting at any time.
Opponent ex auditorio:
The public may pose questions to the candidate ex-auditorio. The deadline to make this known is during the break between the two opponents. Questions ex auditorio can be submitted to disputation chair, Dean Leif Skiftenes Flak leif.s.flak@uia.no