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

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? PDF 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

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

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? PDF Author: Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262533901
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

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

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

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? PDF Author: Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262342332
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

Transient Workspaces

Transient Workspaces PDF Author: Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262326167
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
An account of technology in Africa from an African perspective, examining hunting in Zimbabwe as an example of an innovative mobile workspace. In this book, Clapperton Mavhunga views technology in Africa from an African perspective. Technology in his account is not something always brought in from outside, but is also something that ordinary people understand, make, and practice through their everyday innovations or creativities—including things that few would even consider technological. Technology does not always originate in the laboratory in a Western-style building but also in the society in the forest, in the crop field, and in other places where knowledge is made and turned into practical outcomes. African creativities are found in African mobilities. Mavhunga shows the movement of people as not merely conveyances across space but transient workspaces. Taking indigenous hunting in Zimbabwe as one example, he explores African philosophies of mobilities as spiritually guided and of the forest as a sacred space. Viewing the hunt as guided mobility, Mavhunga considers interesting questions of what constitutes technology under regimes of spirituality. He describes how African hunters extended their knowledge traditions to domesticate the gun, how European colonizers, with no remedy of their own, turned to indigenous hunters for help in combating the deadly tsetse fly, and examines how wildlife conservation regimes have criminalized African hunting rather than enlisting hunters (and their knowledge) as allies in wildlife sustainability. The hunt, Mavhunga writes, is one of many criminalized knowledges and practices to which African people turn in times of economic or political crisis. He argues that these practices need to be decriminalized and examined as technologies of everyday innovation with a view toward constructive engagement, innovating with Africans rather than for them.

Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa

Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa PDF Author: Nicolas Friederici
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026236283X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The hope and hype about African digital entrepreneurship, contrasted with the reality on the ground in local ecosystems. In recent years, Africa has seen a digital entrepreneurship boom, with hundreds of millions of dollars poured into tech cities, entrepreneurship trainings, coworking spaces, innovation prizes, and investment funds. Politicians and technologists have offered Silicon Valley-influenced narratives of boundless opportunity and exponential growth, in which internet-enabled entrepreneurship allows Africa to "leapfrog" developmental stages to take a leading role in the digital revolution. This book contrasts these aspirations with empirical research about what is actually happening on the ground. The authors find that although the digital revolution has empowered local entrepreneurs, it does not untether local economies from the continent's structural legacies.

African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development

African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development PDF Author: Muchie Mammo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781909112094
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description


African Motors

African Motors PDF Author: Joshua Grace
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478021276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
In African Motors, Joshua Grace examines how Tanzanian drivers, mechanics, and passengers reconstituted the automobile into a uniquely African form between the late 1800s and the early 2000s. Drawing on hundreds of oral histories, extensive archival research, and his ethnographic fieldwork as an apprentice in Dar es Salaam's network of garages, Grace counters the pervasive narratives that Africa is incompatible with technology and that the African use of cars is merely an appropriation of technology created elsewhere. Although automobiles were invented in Europe and introduced as part of colonial rule, Grace shows how Tanzanians transformed them, increasingly associating their own car use with maendeleo, the Kiswahili word for progress or development. Focusing on the formation of masculinities based in automotive cultures, Grace also outlines the process through which African men remade themselves and their communities by adapting technological objects and systems for local purposes. Ultimately, African Motors is an African-centered story of development featuring everyday examples of Africans forging both individual and collective cultures of social and technological wellbeing through movement, making, and repair.

The OECD Innovation Strategy Getting a Head Start on Tomorrow

The OECD Innovation Strategy Getting a Head Start on Tomorrow PDF Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
ISBN: 9264083472
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book provides a set of principles for fostering innovation in people (workers and consumers), in firms and in government, taking an in-depth look at the scope of innovation and how it is changing, as well as where and how it is occurring.

Entrepreneurship, Technology Commercialisation, and Innovation Policy in Africa

Entrepreneurship, Technology Commercialisation, and Innovation Policy in Africa PDF Author: Chux Daniels
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303058240X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive overview of role of entrepreneurship, technology commercialisation and innovation policy for the achievement of economic development and prosperity in African societies. It adopts a broad innovation systems approach. The book examines entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology commercialisation alongside context-specific factors associated with them. It also provides an interdisciplinary perspective, by discussing the above disciplines in a connected way. This book is presented in three distinct parts. It starts by discussing entrepreneurship and the state of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Africa. It then moves on to present technology commercialisation in Africa, before finally discussing the future directions for entrepreneurship, technology commercialisation and innovation policy. This broad picture provided in the book enables the reader to grasp the relevant messages, whilst the detailed analysis applies world-class theories and frameworks to deepen the readers understanding of key concepts and issues examined.

Segregated Species

Segregated Species PDF Author: Jules Skotnes-Brown
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421448572
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
A timely history of the connections between science, segregation, and species in twentieth-century South Africa. Throughout the twentieth century, rural South Africa was dominated by systems of racial segregation and apartheid that brutally oppressed its Black population. At the same time, the countryside was defined by a related settler obsession: the control of animals that farmers, scientists, and state officials considered pests. Elephants rampaged on farmlands, trampling fences, crops, and occasionally humans. Grain-eating birds flocked on plantations, devouring harvests. Bubonic plague crept across the veld in the bodies of burrowing and crop-devouring rodents. In Segregated Species, Jules Skotnes-Brown argues that racial segregation and pest control were closely connected in early twentieth-century South Africa. Strategies for the containment of pests were redeployed for the management of humans and vice versa. Settlers blamed racialized populations for the abundance of pests and mobilized metaphors of pestilence to dehumanize them. Even knowledge produced about pests was segregated into the binary categories of "native" and "scientific." Black South Africans critiqued such injustices, and some circulated revolutionary rhetoric through images and metaphors of locusts. Ultimately, pest-control practices played an important role in shaping colonial hierarchies of race and species and in mediating relationships among human groups. Skotnes-Brown demonstrates that the history of South Africa—and colonial history generally—cannot be fully understood without analyzing the treatment of both animals and humans.

Social and Technological Innovation in Africa

Social and Technological Innovation in Africa PDF Author: Solomon Nwaka
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811601550
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This book examines the landscape of sustained investment in research and innovation in Africa, which are critical for development. This cutting-edge analysis is based on empirical evidence and the author’s experience in managing health and related innovations on the continent and globally. It concludes, for the first time, that African innovation is largely driven by the principles of Social, rather than Technological innovation. The significance of this finding and the need to optimize, scale and sustain this dominant innovation is addressed in various chapters that analyze the status, challenges and opportunities. Particularly, the financing, collaboration and coordination patterns for these activities on the continent show a fragmented ecosystem that is largely dependent on external donors and aid. The importance of supportive policies, leadership and venture mechanisms that incentivizes public and private entities to innovate is further exemplified by the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book proposes mechanism to address identified challenges.