Resilient ICT4D: Building and Sustaining our Community in Pandemic Times

Masiero, Silvia; Nielsen, Petter

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, disproportionally affecting vulnerable people and deepening pre-existing inequalities (Dreze, 2020; Qureshi, 2021), have interested the very same"development"processes that the IFIP Working Group 9.4 on the Implications of Information and Digital Technologies for Development has dealt with over time. A global development paradigm (Oldekop et al., 2020) has emerged in response to the global nature of the crisis, infusing new meaning in the spirit of"making a better world"with ICTs (Walsham, 2012) that always have characterised ICT4D research. Such a new meaning contextualises our research in the landscape of the first pandemic of the datafied society (Milan&Trere, 2020), coming to terms with the silencing of narratives from the margins within the pandemic (Milan et al., 2021) - in Qureshi's (2021) words, a"pandemics within the pandemic"producing new socio-economic inequities in a state of global emergency.