Reposted from the ICTs for Development blog.
I have been thinking about this question since the time I started my PhD nearly 16 months ago. My research is interested in understanding how digital interventions can be re-engineered for positive social outcomes. While it draws from a “critical” justice-based lens, it is, arguably, anchored in the terrain of (hopeful) “possibilities”, aiming to contribute to knowledge and theory building on what equitable digital futures can (and should) look like. In case you noticed, and are wondering, why my framing alludes to “critical” and “hope / possibilities” as dualities or oppositional forces, it is because I fear that positive, hopeful and other optimism-based sensibilities, particularly in academia, risk getting dismissed as naïve and “un” critical. Turns out that my fears are not completely unfounded.
In Western intellectual tradition, critique tends to be counted as “intellectually rigorous” and “theoretically sophisticated” only when it is associated with a predominantly negative reflex (Felski, 2015). As researchers groomed in this tradition, we are trained to become champions of suspicion and subversion, always primed to sniff out hidden agendas and dark motives, politicise and historicise knowledge claims, complicate popular narratives, and expose the continuities of power hierarchies (Felski, 2011). From the anthropologist unmasking the imperialist convictions of their predecessors to legal scholars assailing the neutrality of the law, we are all encouraged (and rewarded?) to challenge, to question, to problematise, to subvert, to “suspect without limits” (Ibid).
I am a product of, and also a (proud) contributor to this adversarial and negatively oriented form of critique. However, in the last few months, I have found myself wishing that I was also equally equipped with the theoretical sensibilities and the methodological repertoire to construct possibilities and alternatives. That I had learnt, with the same fervour, what it means to foreground hope, imagination, agency and creativity in our work. That, in resisting, I was also being equally challenged to resist the rejection of possibilities. That, our collective suspicions about “things not being the way they appear to be” also extended to the nearly universal, and ironically, uncritical acceptance of the negative critique as an obligatory position (Felski, 2012). That, our reflexive capacities were also being attuned to challenge its methodological centrality to critique.
But, the truth, to quote Felski (2015), is that ‘we are trained to be hyperarticulate about our adversaries and excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves’. In her book, “From Pessimism to Promise – Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech”, Arora (2024a) cites the example of a researcher who went looking for evidence of discrimination and oppression on social media platforms, only to despair when she instead found that they were a source of joy and glee. I suspect many of us have been in this position. Conflicts, oppression, anger, sorrow – these are familiar territories for knowledge construction and theory-building. But harmony, amelioration, happiness, pleasure – we struggle with the vocabulary, the theoretical repertoire, the methodologies even, to study these, not to mention many among us who may question whether these are research-worthy topics in the first place.
To be critical, it is necessary to be suspicious, even paranoid, that our interlocutors live in the thralls of the illusions of their real motives, and that we need to skilfully retrieve counter-intuitive and uncomplimentary meanings (Felski, 2012). If something is appealing, attractive or satisfying to them, it is because they do not understand how social power works, or they do not know that they are historically determined or culturally constructed, the assumption being of course, that we do (Ibid). It is as if there is a compulsion to cancel out the positive with the negative (Arora, 2024a).
What if such a critique has outlived its usefulness, and deteriorated to the point of becoming a gullible weapon of en-masse deconstruction (Latour, 2004)? In what way, to paraphrase Latour, would the suspicions of a “critical” scholar in academia be different from the suspicions of a presumably “uncritical other” who regards climate change as a socially constructed anti-progress conspiracy that lacks scientific certainty? What if, ultimately, critique has not been critical enough (Ibid)?
These questions are neither new nor novel. 1990s literary scholar and queer activist Eve Sedgwick was one of the early attackers of this form of critique, calling it out as being ontologically rigid, morally cruel, and politically ineffective (Sedgwick, 1997, cited in London, 2016). Following from this, along with Sedgwick’s concepts of reparative reading, scholars in the humanities are engaging in discussions on “post-critical sensibility” as a methodological approach to reading and interpreting literary and historical texts (London, 2016). Philosophers of education have stimulated similar discussions by publishing a Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy that takes an affirmative approach to existing educational discourses and practices as being valuable in themselves (Brüggemann et al., 2020).
Outside of this, a new multi and trans-disciplinary field, “possibility studies,” has emerged, rooted in the human capacity to hope, imagine, and envision new futures (Glăveanu, 2023). Rejecting deterministic views, it embraces agentic, generative, and open-ended understandings of the world. This body of work argues that engaging with the “possible” is inherently political, as it grants some individuals and groups the status of ‘holding potential’ while denying it to others. These choices implicate dynamics of power, and have decisive consequences for nature, human agency, opportunity and dignity (Ibid).
Arguably, though, the forms of critique beyond the negative need more attending to, particularly in fields related to the “digital”, which have increasingly naturalised despair and pessimism at the back of the impositions of technologies appearing as either inevitable or intractable (Arora, 2024b). It is certainly the case that digital technologies have had damaging outcomes for people and the planet. These are not unintended consequences of supposedly well-meaning digitalisation objectives, nor are they academic insistences of problematising or politicising digital development processes and outcomes (Akbari & Masiero, 2025).
They are, rather, systematically steered processes designed to consolidate power and cast an ever-expanding net of control over all dimensions of society – from the social to the economic, the political to the environmental. It is not an exaggeration to state that many of the instantiations of the current digital epoch have material life- and-death consequences for vulnerable populations, even as they simultaneously fuel corporate ambition and state power on the other hand (Ibid). And yet, if along with this, we also accept that digital technologies are crucial for the proper functioning of societies, then we have a moral imperative to move beyond the negative reflex and collaborate to construct alternate digital futures, rooted in values of fairness, equity and sustainability. The good fight needs to continue – the enemy though is not hope and optimism, but technological determinism and solutionism (Arora, 2024b).
What does this mean for being critical and hopeful in ICT4D? In response to his own provocation, Latour proposes that ‘the critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who ‘assembles’’ (Latour, 2004). Critique in this sense can be generative, moving beyond de-bunk and de-construct to repair and reconstruct. In digital development for example, values of repair and regeneration have inspired research on indigenous communities and practices to innovation. Jimenez et al. (2022) present a case study of an indigenous community-led initiative in the Peruvian Andes based on the Andean concept of Buen Vivir (Good Living), which emphasizes harmony with nature, community well-being, and collective prosperity. Through this case study, they present an alternative non-western approach to innovation, one that is driven and sustained by reciprocal relationships between the human and the non-human nature, collaborative deliberative processes, and ecological values such as a food sovereignty.
Another example of theorising hopeful possibilities comes from Sahay (2023), who constructs “hope” as a cultural capacity that enables individuals and communities to envision and strive toward better futures. Hope, Sahay argues, ‘does not mean that we deny realities but represents a force to identify and engage with realities’. Through a case study on the digitalisation of public hospital information systems in India, he demonstrates how information technologies can serve as both a foundation and a vehicle for hope and argues for ICT4D practitioners to centre hope as a moral imperative.
Akbari and Masiero (2023) attempt to offer a renewed understanding of what “critical” means for ICT4D. They note that while problematisation is essential to critique, criticality also needs a constructive orientation. Constructive critique, as their book highlights, needs to be situated within the social, political, and material contexts of digital infrastructures, necessitates epistemic plurality, and centres the communities implicated in and most impacted by these infrastructures (Akbari & Masiero, 2025). Importantly, their conceptualisation, while keeping a firm focus on problematisation, also steers it into the zone of re-imagination and re-construction, actively acknowledging, and engaging with the presence of harms, injustice and discriminations in imagining more just and equitable futures.
Methodologically speaking, there has also been an emergence of speculative approaches to criticality. In the field of education and technology for example, storytelling and fiction have been used as a method to develop alternate visions for more equitable futures in education (Macgilchrist, 2021). Storytelling can be a useful first step in mobilizing and unifying some sort of consensus over ways in which we might attempt to shape the future, in ways that are explicitly speculative and fictional (Selwyn et al., 2020). Speculative methods are also gaining ground outside academia. India-based civil society organisation Digital Futures Lab that is working on inclusive AI technologies recently used a series of foresight methodologies including fictional stories to examine the near-future impacts of GenAI on society (Nair, Theo, & Sen, 2024). These methods, however, are not to be seen as prophetic, as predicting some kind of a planned future, or worse still, as idealising the future as a distant, hopeful place abundant with possibilities (Selwyn et al., 2020). Their relevance instead, lies in provoking thinking about the present and historicising it, and in their openness to a plurality of worldviews about desirable digital futures (Ibid).
A final important point needs to be made about the Digital Good Network, an interdisciplinary, cross-sector, social science-led research network which aims to advance understanding of how digital technologies can have good societal outcomes. Normatively aligned to the idea of “what should be” rather than “what shouldn’t be”, the network invites us to imagine ‘the digital good’ in its multiple potential ways, keeping of course, our critical senses intact (Digital Good Network, 2024). Here again, there is a keenness to nurture and develop a more optimism-based, generative form of critique by cutting through disciplinary silos in academia and building bridges across research and practice.
Concluding thoughts
To end with the question that I began this post with – Can critique encompass hope and optimism? I offer that it can, and importantly it should. This is not meant to be imposed normatively as a burden – i.e., as a belief that there is always room for hope despite all the devastation that surrounds us. It is also not a cry against negative thought, or an assertion to romanticise what can be. It is, instead, an invitation to confront the perceived intractability of the “negative” reflex or its centrality to the “critical” tradition, while remaining tethered to, and accounting for the tensions that are so deeply embedded in ICT4D today. It is a call to reflexively imagine what alternate forms of critique can look like, and indeed, whose voices need to be centred. Some may regard any move towards a more optimism-based critique as premature because the harms have only amplified. Ultimately, the choice to encompass hope and optimism (or any other alternate) is also a political choice to develop critique by resisting the foreclosure of possibility.
The instances cited in the previous section provide one small window to understand how alternate forms of critique are being materialised in ICT4D. Who is entitled to espouse such critiques, what are the conditions under which they may be valid, and who stands to gain from it? What are their implications for theory building in critical ICT4D? What methodological opportunities do they afford? As a community I hope we can bring in more dialogue and engage in a lively debate in this space.
Note: This article gives the views of the author/academic featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the Global Development Institute as a whole.
Cover photo by Conny Schneider on Unsplash