This paper joins the growing body of critical HCI work that studies the digitization of the Global South and reports the elements of ‘secularization’ in it. Based on a year-long ethnography on the contemporary transformations in religious practices in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this paper presents how the emerging “digital” cattle marketplaces subdue various forms of traditional manifestations of urban religiosity during Eid-ul-Adha, the second-largest Islamic festival in the city. This paper further depicts how such secularization contributes to diminishing rural-urban linkages, affecting electoral politics, and reducing the tolerance to religious celebrations in a city. Drawing from a rich body of work in critical urban studies, postcolonial computing, and sociology of religions, we explain how such oft-overlooked embedding of secularization in computing affects the religious fabrics in the urban regions of the Global South, and discuss its implication for HCI scholarship in diversity, inclusion, and development.
Gospels of Modernity: Digital Cattle Markets, Urban Religiosity, and Secular Computing in the Global South
Published 2021 in International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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- Publication year
2021
- Venue
International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publication date
2021-05-06
- Fields of study
Sociology, Computer Science
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