ICTD Research in Latin America: literature review, scholar feedback, and recommendations

ABSTRACT

Reviews of the ICTD literature have noted a scarcity of studies about Latin American countries. We investigate (1) what are the alternatives to ICTD and English-language ICTD publication venues researchers utilize to disseminate their work and why they may do so, and (2) what methodological, theoretical, and contextual characteristics these researchers bring to their publications. The study takes a two-pronged approach to answer these questions: a survey of researchers who have conducted ICTD research in Latin America and an analysis of their ICTD publications. We find that researchers use an array of specific alternative and additional terms to describe ICTD research, that methodological and theoretical characteristics of the literature resemble ICTD in general, and that contextual coverage of the region is lacking. Our results prompt a set of recommendations for better incorporating scholarship about Latin America in the ICTD field as well as improving global coverage of the ICTD community.

KEYWORDS:

• Latin America
• ICTD
• literature review
• ICTs
• development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Caroline Stratton is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research poses and responds to pressing questions about how organizations may effectively design and implement technology interventions for social good. Stratton’s analytic approach integrates theory from and contributes to multiple disciplines, including communication studies, organization studies, and information systems. She has experience in team ethnography methods, comparative studies, and international fieldwork.

David Nemer is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. His research and teaching interests cover the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), ICT for Development (ICT4D), and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). Nemer is an ethnographer whose fieldworks include the Slums of Vitória, Brazil; Havana, Cuba; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia. Nemer is the author of Favela Digital: The other side of technology (Editora GSA, 2013). He holds a Ph.D. in Computing, Culture, and Society from Indiana University and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Saarland University. Nemer has written for The Guardian, El País, The Huffington Post (HuffPost), and The Intercept_.

Notes

1 Preliminary findings from this study were published as a long abstract in the HCI Across Borders Symposium at CHI 2017 (see Nemer & Stratton, 2017).

2 We first review highly visible English-language publication venues for ICTD research before later examining a range of venues in Spanish and Portuguese as well. This section provides a snapshot of the English-language ICTD literature. We also note that contributions in this literature do not solely come from researchers positioned outside Latin America writing about the region. Researchers based in Latin American institutions conducting research about Latin America also publish their work in these venues.

3 We note that our search for scholarly books is not necessarily exhaustive, as indexed databases and search tools for scholarly books have significant limitations for comprehensive search.

4 These books are: (1) Kleine (2013); (2) Schulz and Dunn (2016); Gigler (2015).