Seamfully Interwoven: Piecing Together Havana's Internet

Drawing on the fields of HCI, ICTD, and Social Computing, my research explores how increasing internet access influences the lives of intended users and how we might leverage local information infrastructures to design more effective services for users in emerging markets. Through ethnographic research in Havana, my dissertation unpacks the ways individuals actively and creatively stitch together multiple information infrastructures to create their own versions of the "internet." Using Cuba as a case study, my work explores how future internet access initiatives might successfully map onto local information infrastructures to provide meaningful, sustainable engagement with the internet among under-connected communities in resource-constrained parts of the world.