This is an exciting conference on campus that will be of special interest to students who are exploring global studies, development, or science, technology, and medicine from a global perspective in their studies. The keynote lecture is by Dr. Julie Livingston (Rutgers University), who is a recent MacArthur Genius Grant winner and author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke UP, 2012). Her talk and the conference panels are open to the public.
Africanizing Technology
Wesleyan University
Thursday, March 5th
Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, Room 311
5:00pm Keynote Lecture: Julie Livingston (Rutgers University)
“Pharmaceutical Technologies and the Nature of Efficacy in Botswana”
Friday, March 6th: Conference Panels
Usdan University Center, Room 110
9:00am Panel I: Technologies of Identity and Knowledge Production
Drew Thompson, Bard College–“Disputes over the Past: The biometric passport and studio photography in Mozambique, 1980-Recent Times”
Crystal Biruk, Oberlin College–“Standards and ‘gifts’: Soap as improvisational technology in Malawian survey research worlds”
Summer Wood, New York University–“Technologies of Identity in Tanzania”
Panel Chair: Jennifer Tucker, Wesleyan University
10:45am Panel II: Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Development
Susan P. Wyche, Michigan State–“‘If God Gives Me the Chance I will Design my Own Phone’: Rural Kenyan Repairers and Reimagining Mobile Phone Design”
Sean Jacobs, The New School and “Africa is a Country” Blog–“Shifting African Digital Landscapes”
Gloria Emeagwali, Connecticut State University– “Interconnections between female entrepreneurship and technological innovation in the Nigerian Context”
Solen Feyissa, University of Minnesota–“Contextualizing Educational Uses of Information Communication Technologies inside and outside of Ethiopian Classrooms”
Panel Chair: Mike Nelson, Wesleyan University
1:45pm Panel III: Imagining New Technological Cultures
Laura Ann Twagira, Wesleyan University–Becoming Master’s of Nature: Women’s Transformation of a Colonial Irrigation Project in French West Africa”
Joshua Grace, University of South Carolina–“Tinkering, Techne, and Cars: The Africanization of a Hindi-named European Technology”
Mahriana Rofheart, Georgia Gwinnett College–“Fictional Technologies of Collaboration”
Jennifer Hart, Wayne State University–“Of Mammy Trucks and Men: African Automobility and the Politics of Development in Colonial Ghana”
Panel Chair: Heidi Gengenbach, University of Massachusetts Boston
3:15pm Coffee Break
3:30pm Panel IV: Technological Cultures of Health and Healing
Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech–“Africanizing synthetic chemistry?: Hope in Drug Discovery ‘by and for’ Africa”
Donna Patterson, Wellesley College–“Pharmacy, Biomedicine, and Gender in Senegal”
Tara Dosumu Diener, University of Michigan–“Practice Makes Perfect: Signal, Noise, and Clinical Imagination in the Maternity Ward”
Sarah Hardin, St. Anselm College–“Modern Potions: The Social and Health Repercussions of Pesticides in Senegal and the Francophone World”
Panel Chair: Paul Erickson, Wesleyan University
5:30pm Closing Discussion
For more information please see the conference website: africanizingtechnology.conference.wesleyan.edu
Or, contact the conference organizer Prof. Laura Ann Twagira (ltwagira@wesleyan.edu)