From: Bobbi Thomason <[email protected]> Please join us on *Monday, November 3rd* from *12-1:15* for the next WTO Colloquium in *Spilker 232*.
*Speaker:* Jenna Burrell, University of California at Berkeley, School of Information *Title:* On the Importance of Price Information to Farmers and Economists *Abstract:* The notion that farmers use mobile phones to acquire market price information has become a kind of shorthand for the potential of this technology to empower rural, low-income populations in the Global South. In this talk, I will touch upon some recent projects I've undertake with collaborators Janaki Srinivasan and Elisa Oreglia that interrogate and complicate this simple formulation. This work considers the translation of ‘market prices’ from neoclassical economic model, to development policy truism, to application in technological system building. Yet, the technological systems that often result, called market information systems or MIS, frequently fail to gain users or affect prices or profits in the ways that have been promised. Our ethnographic work among fishers in Kerala, India, on Lake Victoria in Uganda, and farmers in Northern rural China surfaces counter-narratives about mobile phones (and market price) that could explain why. *Bobbi Thomason* | Stanford University Center for Work, Technology & Organization Department of Management Science & Engineering 215.510.4856 | [email protected]
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