Abstract
Our chapter employs the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program as an empirical space for contrasting and comparing the writings of Amartya Sen and Bruno Latour. Through discussing these two authors, we open a theoretical passage between development studies and science and technology studies. We argue that Sen’s ideas of development and human value may be productively combined with Latour’s work on the shaping of human agency and sociability through technics and design. We claim that both Sen and Latour view development as a process of ‘liberation within’—a careful reordering of everyday socio-technical relations—rather than as a process of ‘liberation from’ that seeks to transcend such relations. We also point out conceptual commonalities between the two authors by discussing Sen’s notion of ‘conversion’ and Latour’s notion of ‘translation’, indicating that together they sensitize us to the collective aspects of development.
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In 2007 and 2008, OLPC organized ‘Give One Get One’ campaigns that enabled private persons in the U.S. to donate one laptop and receive one for themselves for $399. The first campaign was successful (167,000 units sold), whereas the second resulted in markedly fewer donations (12,500 units sold) (see Kraemer et al. 2009). Currently, it is possible for private persons to donate XO laptops at the cost of $199 apiece via the Amazon website www.amazon.com
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Most of the OLPC programs across the world are at a pilot stage with governments ordering between 1,000 and 10,000 units at a time. Countries that have participated actively include Uruguay (420,000 units), where every primary school pupil now has a personal XO laptop, Peru (290,000 units), Rwanda (110,000 units) Argentina (60,000 units) and Mexico (50,000 units).This estimate is taken from the OLPC wiki pages (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments). Others have noted that exact figures are difficult to acquire (see James 2010; Kraemer et al. 2009).
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Sen’s reluctance to list crucial capabilities distinguishes him from philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has engaged in the normative project of defining central capabilities for evaluative purposes. David A. Clark (2005, 1346) argues that this is a strategic move from Sen, who, in allowing the capabilities approach to remain incomplete, sidesteps “the charge of paternalism by leaving each and every person with the freedom to decide his/her own set of functionings.”
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Latour has often elaborated this idea in the shape of the notion of ‘mediators’ which he separates from ‘intermediaries’ (Latour 1999, 2005). Intermediaries reflect the way technologies and artefacts are often conceptualised in social sciences: as instrumental means for purposeful human action. On the contrary, the notion of mediator suggests that any relation between, for instance, a user and a technological innovation is specific and should be studied accordingly. Mediators “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” (Latour 2005, 39). To see something as a mediator directs attention to the specific ways in which human and non-human materials form relations “that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies the original two” (Latour 1999, 179).
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Kullman, K., Lee, N. (2012). Liberation from/Liberation within: Examining One Laptop per Child with Amartya Sen and Bruno Latour. In: Oosterlaken, I., van den Hoven, J. (eds) The Capability Approach, Technology and Design. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3879-9_3
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