Africanizing Technology Conference — March 5 & 6

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)