Liberation from/Liberation within: Examining One Laptop per Child with Amartya Sen and Bruno Latour

Abstract

Our chapter employs the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program as an empirical space for contrasting and comparing the writings of Amartya Sen and Bruno Latour. Through discussing these two authors, we open a theoretical passage between development studies and science and technology studies. We argue that Sen’s ideas of development and human value may be productively combined with Latour’s work on the shaping of human agency and sociability through technics and design. We claim that both Sen and Latour view development as a process of ‘liberation within’—a careful reordering of everyday socio-technical relations—rather than as a process of ‘liberation from’ that seeks to transcend such relations. We also point out conceptual commonalities between the two authors by discussing Sen’s notion of ‘conversion’ and Latour’s notion of ‘translation’, indicating that together they sensitize us to the collective aspects of development.