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January 2007
Revital (Revi) Sterling,
an Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society
PhD student, has been named a 2007
Microsoft Research Fellow.
The two-year fellowships, which recognize outstanding PhD students in
Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics,
were awarded to twelve recipients in 2007.
Sterling's research focuses on the use of Information and Communication
Technology to empower women in developing regions. The digital and gender
divides present in these regions exacerbate the negative impact of each on
women's lives. She is exploring these pronounced gender divides -- their
cognitive and behavioral aspects, the policies and programs that have tried to
close the gaps, and the range of gender and development theories that inform
the research on this subject. Both research and practice demonstrate that
women's empowerment and poverty alleviation go hand in hand. This underscores
one of the major tenets in gender and development -- in order for development
initiatives to be successful, they have to be appropriate and sustainable and
equitable.
"Advancement through Interactive Radio", or AIR, links rural,
disadvantaged women in Eastern Africa with their local community radio
stations. Radio is the dominant mass media in sub-Saharan Africa, and community
radio is rapidly growing as an alternative to commercial and government
programming. In many areas, community radio is the only reliable source of
public information. While community radio is gaining significant popularity
with listeners and development agencies alike, the potential for community
radio to serve as an agent of social and economic advancement is limited by its
inherent unidirectionality and dearth of women's involvement in station
management, participation, and programming. As part of her doctoral research,
she is developing and evaluating a mechanism for asynchronous listener feedback
that addresses these deficiencies. She is currently creating a simple, rugged,
portable and inexpensive computing device that is capable of recording, storing
and forwarding voice feedback from rural women listeners who currently have no
other way to communicate with their community radio station, due to myriad
resource and gender/societal challenges. AIR offers women the opportunity to
participate in community radio broadcasts as "citizen journalists," who, by
discussing issues of concern in the virtual space of radio, may gain both the
information and status to affect positive change in the their actual
communities.
Revi is advised by Professor John Bennett of Computer Science.
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