[Air-L] Book Talk, Silicon Elsewhere, with Andrea Pollio, Jan 27

[Rafael Do Nascimento Grohmann]

Hi AoIR,

DigiLabour<https://www.instagram.com/digilabour/> invites you to an online book talk with Andrea Pollio (Polytechnic of Turin & University of Cape Town) on Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital (University of California Press)

This will take place on January 27, 10am ET, on the DigiLabour YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wkm6eWTj2c

After the talk, there will be a conversation with Julie Yujie Chen<https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/iccit/people/yujie-julie-chen> (University of Toronto) and Rafael Grohmann<https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/acm/rafael-grohmann> <https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/acm/rafael-grohmann> (University of Toronto).

About the book
Heralded as Africa's "Silicon Savannah"—a cradle of innovation—Nairobi has become a technology and innovation capital for Kenya and for the continent at large. With a national strategy that has prioritized digital technology for the last two decades, many Chinese digital champions, smaller startups, and investors have since chosen Nairobi as their African landing pad. Mapping the interface between Nairobi's innovation scene and China's digital presence there, Silicon Elsewhere tells a unique story of ingenuity and adaptation, failure and speculation, and hopefulness and pragmatism. Andrea Pollio's ethnography draws on interviews with cautious venture capitalists, renegade entrepreneurs, dedicated bureaucrats, and ambitious data scientists to explore the competing meanings of contemporary techno-capital. Moving between leafy coworking spaces and the temperature-controlled rooms of brand-new data centers, Pollio locates Nairobi among the experimental capitals, not peripheries, of technological change in the early twenty-first century.

See you there!

Rafael



--

dr. Rafael Grohmann

Assistant Professor of Media Studies

Department of Arts, Culture and Media<https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/acm/rafael-grohmann>

Faculty of Information<https://ischool.utoronto.ca/profile/rafael-grohmann/>

University of Toronto

Leader, DigiLabour<https://digilabour.com.br/>
Research Associate, University of Oxford<https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/rafael-grohmann/>

Founding Editor, Platforms & Society<https://journals.sagepub.com/home/PNS>

Principal Investigator, Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP)<https://digilabour.com.br/worker-owned-intersectional-platforms-woip/>

Co-Lead, Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF)<https://criticaldigitalmethods.ca/creative-labour-critical-futures/>

Researcher, AI Policy Observatory for the World of Work<https://www.essex.ac.uk/research-projects/ai-policy-observatory-for-the-world-of-work>

Faculty Affiliate, Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society<https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/>  <https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/>