[Air-L] Today, Online Book Talk, Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China and Techno-Capital

[Rafael Do Nascimento Grohmann]

Hi there,

Starting soon: today at 10am ET, we’re hosting an online book talk with Andrea Pollio on Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capitalism.

Join us here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wkm6eWTj2c

Description
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


best,

Rafael



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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>
Senior Fellow, Massey College<https://www.masseycollege.ca/>

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