I am hiring a Digital Geographer to work with me at the Oxford Internet Institute for two years on a full-time contract (we’ll also consider part-time options for the right person). My existing research (much of it with wonderful collaborators) has uncovered highly uneven digital geographies: with some parts of the world far more like to… Read More »
Good news: my dissertation on African technology innovation hubs is now complete! The permanent digital record (incl. a pdf for download) is here, and the hardbound copy will shortly be deposited with Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries as well. Friederici, N. (2016, October). Innovation Hubs in Africa: Assemblers of Technology Entrepreneurs. Dissertation, Oxford, UK: Oxford Internet Institute, University… Read More »
I have a new paper out in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers with Andrea Ballatore and Shilad Sen. In it, we ask (and empirically answer) questions about the the local-ness versus foreign-ness of content that Google serves up to people around the world. You can access the full paper below. Ballatore, A., Graham,… Read More »
Our ICT and Development seminar series gathers leading scholars and practitioners to reflect on the influence of new communication technologies on development processes. We were lucky to have four great speakers this year. If you didn’t manage to make it to any of the talks, you can find recordings of them all below.
The trade union leaders from across the African continent are coming together to meet in Dakar, Senegal for 4th UNI Africa Regional Conference on March 23-25, 2017. This will be a gathering of 161 Unions from 40 African countries and roughly 500 participants will be attending it, along with invited guests from across the world. We… Read More »
This report is based on a three-year investigation conducted by researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford and the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) at the University of Pretoria. Online gig work is becoming increasingly important to workers living in low- and middle-income countries. Our multi-year and multi-method research… Read More »
As ever more policy-makers, governments and organisations turn to the gig economy and digital labour as an economic development strategy to bring jobs to places that need them, it becomes important to understand better how this might influence the livelihoods of workers. Drawing on a multi-year study with digital workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-east… Read More »
The geography of published and codified knowledge has always had stark core-periphery patterns. Just look at the below map of where academic articles are published from. However, increasing digital connectivity has sparked many hopes for the democratization of information and knowledge production in economically peripheral parts of the world. If you can access the sum… Read More »
We have a new publication out: Ojanperä, S., Graham, M., Straumann, R. K., De Sabbata, S., & Zook, M. (2017). Engagement in the knowledge economy: Regional patterns of content creation with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Information Technologies & International Development, 13, 33–51. It is open access, so please navigate to the journal site to download the… Read More »
This is a short post about the research that I lead into digital work and the digital economy in Sub-Saharan Africa. The work that I do (in tandem with my Geonet colleagues) specifically looks at the growth of digital gig economy and the business process outsourcing activities in four African countries namely South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria… Read More »