Author: Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262533901
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
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. 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
Author: Beaudry, Catherine
Publisher: African Minds
ISBN: 1928331939
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
Young scientists are a powerful resource for change and sustainable development, as they drive innovation and knowledge creation. However, comparable findings on young scientists in various countries, especially in Africa and developing regions, are generally sparse. Therefore, empirical knowledge on the state of early-career scientists is critical in order to address current challenges faced by those scientists in Africa. This book reports on the main findings of a three-and-a-half-year international project in order to assist its readers in better understanding the African research system in general, and more specifically its young scientists. The first part of the book provides background on the state of science in Africa, and bibliometric findings concerning Africa’s scientific production and networks, for the period 2005 to 2015. The second part of the book combines the findings of a large-scale, quantitative survey and more than 200 qualitative interviews to provide a detailed profile of young scientists and the barriers they face in terms of five aspects of their careers: research output; funding; mobility; collaboration; and mentoring. In each case, field and gender differences are also taken into account. The last part of the book comprises conclusions and recommendations to relevant policy- and decision-makers on desirable changes to current research systems in Africa.
Author: Umesh Ramnarain
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429536259
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
School Science Practical Work in Africa presents the scope of research and practice of science practical work in African schools. It brings together prominent science educators and researchers from Africa to share their experience and findings on pedagogical innovations and research-informed practices on school science practical work. The book highlights trends and patterns in the enactment and role of practical work across African countries. Practical work is regarded as intrinsic to science teaching and learning and the form of practical work that is strongly advocated is inquiry-based learning, which signals a definite paradigm shift from the traditional teacher-dominated to a learner-centered approach. The book provides empirical research on approaches to practical work, contextual factors in the enactment of practical work, and professional development in teaching practical work. This book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of science education and educational policy.
Author: Martin Lengwiler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351232657
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
Historically, scientists and experts have played a prominent role in shaping the relationship between Europe and Africa. Starting with travel writers and missionary intellectuals in the 17th century, European savants have engaged in the study of nature and society in Africa. Knowledge about realms of the world like Africa provided a foil against which Europeans came to view themselves as members of enlightened and modern civilisations. Science and technology also offered crucial tools with which to administer, represent and legitimate power relations in a new global world but the knowledge drawn from contacts with people in far-off places provided Europeans with information and ideas that contributed in everyday ways to the scientific revolution and that provided explorers with the intellectual and social capital needed to develop science into modern disciplines at home in the metropole. This book poses questions about the changing role of European science and expert knowledge from early colonial times to post-colonial times. How did science shape understanding of Africa in Europe and how was scientific knowledge shaped, adapted and redefined in African contexts?
Author: Johanna Tayloe Crane
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801469058
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
Countries in sub-Saharan Africa were once dismissed by Western experts as being too poor and chaotic to benefit from the antiretroviral drugs that transformed the AIDS epidemic in the United States and Europe. Today, however, the region is courted by some of the most prestigious research universities in the world as they search for "resource-poor" hospitals in which to base their international HIV research and global health programs. In Scrambling for Africa, Johanna Tayloe Crane reveals how, in the space of merely a decade, Africa went from being a continent largely excluded from advancements in HIV medicine to an area of central concern and knowledge production within the increasingly popular field of global health science.Drawing on research conducted in the U.S. and Uganda during the mid-2000s, Crane provides a fascinating ethnographic account of the transnational flow of knowledge, politics, and research money—as well as blood samples, viruses, and drugs. She takes readers to underfunded Ugandan HIV clinics as well as to laboratories and conference rooms in wealthy American cities like San Francisco and Seattle where American and Ugandan experts struggle to forge shared knowledge about the AIDS epidemic. The resulting uncomfortable mix of preventable suffering, humanitarian sentiment, and scientific ambition shows how global health research partnerships may paradoxically benefit from the very inequalities they aspire to redress. A work of outstanding interdisciplinary scholarship, Scrambling for Africa will be of interest to audiences in anthropology, science and technology studies, African studies, and the medical humanities.
Author: Paul Wenzel Geissler
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082237627X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
In Para-States and Medical Science, P. Wenzel Geissler and the contributors examine how medicine and public health in Africa have been transformed as a result of economic and political liberalization and globalization, intertwined with epidemiological and technological changes. The resulting fragmented medical science landscape is shaped and sustained by transnational flows of expertise and resources. NGOs, universities, pharmaceutical companies and other nonstate actors now play a significant role in medical research and treatment. But as the contributors to this volume argue, these groups have not supplanted the primacy of the nation-state in Africa. Although not necessarily stable or responsive, national governments remain crucial in medical care, both as employers of health care professionals and as sources of regulation, access, and – albeit sometimes counterintuitively - trust for their people. “The state” has morphed into the “para-state” — not a monolithic and predictable source of sovereignty and governance, but a shifting, and at times ephemeral, figure. Tracing the emergence of the “global health” paradigm in Africa in the treatment of HIV, malaria, and leprosy, this book challenges familiar notions of African statehood as weak or illegitimate by elaborating complex new frameworks of governmentality that can be simultaneously functioning and dysfunctional. Contributors. Uli Beisel, Didier Fassin, P. Wenzel Geissler, Rene Gerrets, Ann Kelly, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, Lotte Meinert, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Branwyn Poleykett, Susan Reynolds Whyte
Author: Dennis Raphael
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527571572
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
This volume represents research done at various levels of collaboration, including international, continent-wide, regional and national, in the fields of medical sciences, public health, science policy, science education, agriculture and economic aspects of science. Specific areas covered here include the manufacture of vaccines in Africa, preventing oral cancer in Nigeria, and decreasing the disparity of childhood cancer globally. Contributions also discuss the prevention of HIV/AIDS and cancer in sub-Sahara Africa, early diagnosis of sarcoidosis, tertiary care of children and teens with type 1 diabetes in Africa, detecting obesity as a maternal perinatal and neonatal risk factor, and improving sanitation and health practices.
Author: R. Sooryamoorthy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108816144
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Since gaining political independence in the 1950s, science has rapidly become a prerequisite for national development within many African nations. Supported by international agencies, such as UNESCO, initiatives were taken to direct Africa on the road of scientific development, enabling contributions to world science and significant progress in many specific research areas. However, from a developmental perspective there remains the question of how science influences national development plans and strategies. How far are science policies integrated into the national development plans? What potential and challenges do science and technology pose for Africa and its prospects for wider development? Offering a comprehensive historical and empirical study of science in both colonial and post-colonial Africa, R. Sooryamoorthy brings to light the connections between science, policy and development in African nations. Focusing on understanding the widening gap in science and technology between developed and developing regions, and the integration (or lack of) with national development strategies, this study provides important insights into the potential opportunities and challenges facing Africa in the areas of science.
Author: Weingart, Peter
Publisher: African Minds
ISBN: 1928502032
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Why do we need to communicate science? Is science, with its highly specialised language and its arcane methods, too distant to be understood by the public? Is it really possible for citizens to participate meaningfully in scientific research projects and debate? Should scientists be mandated to engage with the public to facilitate better understanding of science? How can they best communicate their special knowledge to be intelligible? These and a plethora of related questions are being raised by researchers and politicians alike as they have become convinced that science and society need to draw nearer to one another. Once the persuasion took hold that science should open up to the public and these questions were raised, it became clear that coming up with satisfactory answers would be a complex challenge. The inaccessibility of scientific language and methods, due to ever increasing specialisation, is at the base of its very success. Thus, translating specialised knowledge to become understandable, interesting and relevant to various publics creates particular perils. This is exacerbated by the ongoing disruption of the public discourse through the digitisation of communication platforms. For example, the availability of medical knowledge on the internet and the immense opportunities to inform oneself about health risks via social media are undermined by the manipulable nature of this technology that does not allow its users to distinguish between credible content and misinformation. In countries around the world, scientists, policy-makers and the public have high hopes for science communication: that it may elevate its populations educationally, that it may raise the level of sound decision-making for people in their daily lives, and that it may contribute to innovation and economic well-being. This collection of current reflections gives an insight into the issues that have to be addressed by research to reach these noble goals, for South Africa and by South Africans in particular.
Author: Rebecca Hanlin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789966411983
Category : Science and state
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
