A process through which skills, knowledge, and resources are expanded, capacity building, remains a tantalizing and pervasive concept throughout the field of anthropology, though it has received little in the way of critical analysis. By exploring the concept's role in a variety of different settings including government lexicons, religious organizations, environmental campaigns, biomedical training, and fieldwork from around the globe, Hope and Insufficiency seeks to question the histories, assumptions, intentions, and enactments that have led to the ubiquity of capacity building, thereby developing a much-needed critical purchase on its persuasive power.

A process through which skills, knowledge, and resources are expanded, capacity building, remains a tantalizing and pervasive concept throughout the field of anthropology, though it has received little in the way of critical analysis. By exploring the concept's role in a variety of different settings including government lexicons, religious organizations, environmental campaigns, biomedical training, and fieldwork from around the globe, Hope and Insufficiency seeks to question the histories, assumptions, intentions, and enactments that have led to the ubiquity of capacity building, thereby developing a much-needed critical purchase on its persuasive power.

This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised around some of the most important characteristics of anthropological studies of technology today: the diverse knowledge practices that technologies involve and on which they depend; the communities, collectives, and categories that emerge around technologies; anthropology's contribution to proliferating debates on ethics, values, and morality in relation to technology; and infrastructures that highlight how all technologies are embedded in broader political economies and socio-historical processes that shape and often reinforce inequality and discrimination while also generating diversity. All chapters share a commitment to human experiences, embodiments, practices, and materialities in the daily lives of those people and institutions involved in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and/or use of particular technologies. Chapters 11 and 31 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised around some of the most important characteristics of anthropological studies of technology today: the diverse knowledge practices that technologies involve and on which they depend; the communities, collectives, and categories that emerge around technologies; anthropology’s contribution to proliferating debates on ethics, values, and morality in relation to technology; and infrastructures that highlight how all technologies are embedded in broader political economies and socio-historical processes that shape and often reinforce inequality and discrimination while also generating diversity. All chapters share a commitment to human experiences, embodiments, practices, and materialities in the daily lives of those people and institutions involved in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and/or use of particular technologies. Chapters 11 and 31 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.