TY - JOUR
T1 - As a Squash Plant Grows
T2 - Social Textures of Sparse Internet Connectivity in Rural and Tribal Communities
AU - Duarte, Marisa Elena
AU - Vigil-Hayes, Morgan
AU - Zegura, Ellen
AU - Belding, Elizabeth
AU - Masara, Ivone
AU - Nevarez, Jennifer Case
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was funded by NSF CNS-1831698. Authors’ addresses: M. E. Duarte and I. Masara, School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University, PO Box 874308, Tempe, AZ 85287-4308; emails: {marisa.duarte, imasara}@asu.edu; M. Vigil-Hayes, School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems, Northern Arizona University, PO Box 5693, Flagstaff, AZ 86011; email: morgan.vigil-hayes@nau.edu; E. Zegura, School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, Atlanta, GA 30332-0765; email: ewz@cc.gatech.edu; E. Belding, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2104 Harold Frank Hall, Santa Barbara, California, 93106-5110; email: ebelding@ucsb.edu; J. C. Nevarez, Community Learning Network, Po Box 33423, Santa Fe, NM 87594; email: casejcc@yahoo.com.
Funding Information:
between the US Department of Agriculture Rural Utility Services grant programs and the Federal Communication’s Commission’s (FCC) Universal Services Fund programs [34]. This lack of coordination compounds shortages of skilled personnel in these locations, the high costs of trenching and stringing aerial cable through rugged terrain, and limited ability of users to pay higher than average costs of data plans. Telecom investors are thus often unwilling or unable to support or sustain rural infrastructure build-outs. Individuals working on Internet connectivity in rural northern New Mexico describe how federal funds and private investments privilege the commercial development and tax base of first-mile and middle-mile urban and semi-urban geographies: downtown Santa Fe and associated business corridors.
Funding Information:
In this section, we describe how we apply the Full-Circle Framework to characterize and enhance Internet connectivity through the PuebloConnect project. PuebloConnect is funded by the National Science Foundation, and brings together social scientists, computer scientists, community Internet champions, and REDINet to address “the dual goals of improving Internet access in economically marginalized communities while also building local capacity towards regular digital content creation” in northern New Mexico [58]. As of this writing, PuebloConnect is at the mid-point of a three-year project cycle. In this section, we report the findings of an ongoing digital ethnography of the sociotechnical landscape in northern New Mexico, and interweave our characterization with thick description of the social textures and technical design decisions around TVWS deployment and spectrum-related process. Our findings reveal social, technical, geographic, and political conditions that influence how Internet infrastructure in rural northern New Mexico evolves.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Owner/Author.
PY - 2021/7
Y1 - 2021/7
N2 - Researching and designing Internet infrastructure solutions in rural and tribal contexts requires reciprocal relationships between researchers and community partners. Methodologies must be meaningful amid local social textures of life. Achieving transdisciplinarity while relating research impacts to partner communities takes care work, particularly where technical capacity is scarce. The Full Circle Framework is an action research full stack development methodology that foregrounds reciprocity among researchers, communities, and sovereign Native nations as the axis for research purpose and progress. Applying the framework to deploy television white space infrastructure in sovereign Native nations in northern New Mexico reveals challenges for rural computing, including the need to design projects according to the pace of rural and tribal government workflows, cultivate care as a resource for overworked researchers and community partners, and co-create a demand for accurate government data around Internet infrastructures in Indian Country and through rural counties.
AB - Researching and designing Internet infrastructure solutions in rural and tribal contexts requires reciprocal relationships between researchers and community partners. Methodologies must be meaningful amid local social textures of life. Achieving transdisciplinarity while relating research impacts to partner communities takes care work, particularly where technical capacity is scarce. The Full Circle Framework is an action research full stack development methodology that foregrounds reciprocity among researchers, communities, and sovereign Native nations as the axis for research purpose and progress. Applying the framework to deploy television white space infrastructure in sovereign Native nations in northern New Mexico reveals challenges for rural computing, including the need to design projects according to the pace of rural and tribal government workflows, cultivate care as a resource for overworked researchers and community partners, and co-create a demand for accurate government data around Internet infrastructures in Indian Country and through rural counties.
KW - Native American
KW - community-based participatory research
KW - rural computing
KW - spectrum
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85111680656&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85111680656&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3453862
DO - 10.1145/3453862
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85111680656
SN - 1073-0516
VL - 28
JO - ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
JF - ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
IS - 3
M1 - 16
ER -