e-Topia: Localizing the Digital

e-Topia: Localizing the Digital foregrounds the lived experiences of people who engage with, resist, reimagine, and reshape digital systems in diverse and often unexpected ways. It challenges dominant narratives that portray technology as an autonomous force that drives inevitable societal change.

Taking a unique approach, this book counters grand narratives with anthropological insights gathered over more than three decades of fieldwork across Asia, Europe, and North America. It calls for a reorientation of the study of digital technology and poses critical questions: Can we better understand technology by studying how individuals experience, interpret, develop, and use new tools and devices? What can we learn from observing everyday interactions with social media, e-governance platforms, cryptocurrencies, and robotaxis? What happens when we shift the research focus to everyday life? Ultimately, this book is about reclaiming agency by recognizing that technologies are products of design choices, contestations, and diverse visions of the future. Central to this inquiry is the tension between centralized and distributed modes of technopolitics.

This book will appeal to students and researchers of anthropology, science and technology studies, media studies, and global studies, particularly those interested in the politics and poetics of digital technology.

Åshild Kolås is a social anthropologist and Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. She has carried out fieldwork in multi-ethnic communities in India and China and has written on Tibet, Nepal, Inner Mongolia, and Northeast India with a focus on governance and governmentality, identity politics, discourse, and representation. Her previous publications with Routledge include Women, Peace and Security in Myanmar: Between Feminism and Ethnopolitics (2019), Sovereignty Revisited: The Basque Case (2017, co-edited with Pedro Ibarra Güell), and Tourism and Tibetan Culture in Transition. A Place Called Shangrila (2008).