Event Description
Chris Kelty, PhD, University of California, Los Angeles
This talk presents an historical ethnography of the concept of participation; a genealogical account of how participation has become central to our understanding of democratic institutions, social arrangements, and the technologies and infrastructures we build and inhabit today. It starts from a contemporary enthusiasm for participation (especially for digitally enabled participation) as well as a suspicion about it (surveillance, co-optation, extraction of data). Four cases include the creation of “participative management” and the study of workplace participation staring in the fifties; the establishment of mandated participation in the Great Society "Model Cities" program in the sixties; the explosion of forms of "participatory development" internationally in the eighties and nineties; and the “mystical” meaning of participation (methexis) especially in the work of the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Christopher M. Kelty is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who has a joint appointment at the Institute for Society & Genetics and Information Studies. His research focuses on the cultural significance of information technology, especially in science and engineering. He is the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008), as well as numerousarticles on open source and free software.
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