Race, Science, and Technology in the Global African World speaker series

December 3, 2018 (All day)

 

Lecture by Dr. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga (Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts institute of Technology)

Author of Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2014) and What do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? (MIT Press, 2017)

Abstract from Dr. Mavhunga:

"In the last two years, I have become very interested in what two doyens of black writing, Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon, had to say about science and technology. This lecture is a reflection on the 'experiential location' from which both were writing about colonialism and self-liberation. Few of the STS writings on colonialism impress me. They locate their discourse temporally within the 'colonial period,' but do not pause to consider seriously the categories of those who are so-called colonized. Inevitably, they miss the benefits of seeing from experience (from the refusing end), seeing from everyday life 'under colonialism' as generative of intellection. They end up preoccupied with the categories of the 'colonizer,' thus foreclosing the categories formulated from enchained hands yet unchained minds. The preoccupation with the academician concepts whose origins are already 'white'-washed leaves very little breathing space for non-white categories and meanings of the scientific and the technological. It leaves the black scholar feeling like a visitor to the discipline, feeling “postcolonial technoscienced” in syllabi and “peopled out” at conferences on science and technology even in Africa. I would like to reflect on this alienated existence through Cesaire and Fanon, as a starting point towards opening up white STS into a Global STS."

Location and Address

4130 Posvar Hall

Time: TBA