Karem Said

I treat the study of digital infrastructures as a project for making the invisible plain to see and as a means for doing urban anthropology with attention to difference and inequality in online relationships. My ethnographic approach calls for apprehending the emplaced specificity of digital engagement and the material transformation of infrastructures, such as upon urban form.  

My first book project documents the post-revolutionary spread of digital infrastructures along the northwestern periphery of Tunis. Regular internet use eventually took off there following the construction of local 3G signal towers as struggling families set aside money for smart phones. Digital infrastructures among the poor and working-class households of this area were made possible by prior social infrastructures that helped people get by in the city. The research tracks how digital infrastructures incorporated existing relationships, establishing local digital traffic, even as these residents engaged expansive, international worlds. The flourishing of Facebook avatars, from an emplaced perspective, signals an inside out transliteration of neighborhood ties. As a form of pronounced, regulated difference, gender structurally scripts how people use the internet in my field site and the ways this usage is perceived.

More broadly, I am interested to ethnographically unravel status quo presumptions about human-computing relations so as to better position popular, decolonial claims to technologies. My critical, feminist inclinations find value in artful making and doing, techne as craft, and how ordinary people use the internet to alter materiality.