Text

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Afrika?

---

Explorations of science, technology, and innovation in Africa not as the product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but as the working of African knowledge.

In the STI literature, Africa has often been regarded as a recipient of science, technology, and innovation rather than a maker of them. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines show that STI in Africa is not merely the product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but the working of African knowledge. Their contributions focus on African ways of looking, meaning-making, and creating. The chapter authors see Africans as intellectual agents whose perspectives constitute authoritative knowledge and whose strategic deployment of both endogenous and inbound things represents an African-centered notion of STI. “Things do not (always) mean the same from everywhere,” observes Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, the volume's editor. Western, colonialist definitions of STI are not universalizable.

The contributors discuss topics that include the trivialization of indigenous knowledge under colonialism; the creative labor of chimurenga, the transformation of everyday surroundings into military infrastructure; the role of enslaved Africans in America as innovators and synthesizers; the African ethos of “fixing”; the constitutive appropriation that makes mobile technologies African; and an African innovation strategy that builds on domestic capacities. The contributions describe an Africa that is creative, technological, and scientific, showing that African STI is the latest iteration of a long process of accumulative, multicultural knowledge production.

The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Knowledge Unlatched.

Contributors Geri Augusto, Shadreck Chirikure, Chux Daniels, Ron Eglash, Ellen Foster, Garrick E. Louis, D. A. Masolo, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Neda Nazemi, Toluwalogo Odumosu, Katrien Pype, Scott Remer

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

-

Call Number

608.76

Publisher

Cambridge : The MIT Press., 2017

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262342322

Classification

608.76

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

-

Subject(s)

Innovation-Africa

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga

Other Information

Cataloger

Firli

Source

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/2275/What-Do-Science-Technology-and-Innovation-Mean

Validator

-

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

-

Journal Volume

-

Journal Issue

-

Subtitle

-

Parallel Title

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment