This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) and postcolonial studies, with a geographic focus on Africa. We will engage scholarship and media produced by anthropologists, historians, artists, and postcolonial theorists to challenge narratives that construct the continent as a passive recipient of knowledge, projects, 'development', and technological innovations that originate in the global North. Each week, our focus will be on tracing the itineraries of a single technoscientific object, such as pharmaceuticals, water pumps, malaria bed nets, biometric technologies, mobile phones, motorbikes, soap, and no-flush toilets. We will attend to what kinds of relations, politics, emotions, and economies assemble around these objects, and explore science and place, technology and culture, traveling technologies, and the many diverse meanings, stories and politics that adhere to (post)colonial science and technology.
This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) and postcolonial studies, with a geographic focus on Africa. We will engage scholarship and media produced by anthropologists, historians, artists, and postcolonial theorists to challenge narratives that construct the continent as a passive recipient of knowledge, projects, 'development', and technological innovations that originate in the global North. Each week, our focus will be on tracing the itineraries of a single technoscientific object, such as pharmaceuticals, water pumps, malaria bed nets, biometric technologies, mobile phones, motorbikes, soap, and no-flush toilets. We will attend to what kinds of relations, politics, emotions, and economies assemble around these objects, and explore science and place, technology and culture, traveling technologies, and the many diverse meanings, stories and politics that adhere to (post)colonial science and technology.
