"You can only interpret that which you are able to perceive": Demonstrating critical reflexivity in ICT4D work

This paper argues the importance of critical reflex ivity in emancipatory Information Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) work. By drawing from ethnographic encounters in a traditional rural community in Sout h Africa, the author demonstrates how reflexivity became central to understanding that wh ich underpinned collisions and conflicts in the social phenomena. The use of the catchphrase, “ you can only interpret that which you are able to perceive”, is an attempt to initiate self-r eflexivity also in the reader, and to subsequently challenge researcher-practitioners to critique tradition and the assumptions that they often subconsciously make about their own posi tion and role in ICT4D discourses and practice. While demonstrating the reflexivity that helped the researcher uncover, interpret and articulate key collisions from social phenomena, th e paper also reflects on some criteria for critical research, the researcher’s value position, collisions between different views of reality (or value conflicts), and the value of starting out inductively. The paper concludes by showing how Bourdieu’s critical lineage was retrosp ectively applied to help articulate key findings.