Africanizing Technology

By: Solen Feyissa

The photographic record of an academic conference which key question was "How is technology rooted in a longer history of African experiences?"

Drew Thompson of Bard College talks about photography in Mozambique (All images by Solen Feyissa).

Earlier this month, I was invited to a full, two-day conference on “Africanizing Technology” at Wesleyan University in Connecticut (a 40-odd minute car ride from New Haven, where Yale University is). It was organized by Laura Ann Twagira, a historian of West Africa on the Wesleyan faculty. The full program is here. The paper I gave, on “Shifting African Digital Landscapes,” eventually morphed into this talk I gave two weeks later at the London School of Economics. Hopefully the rest of the papers make it to larger audiences outside the academy. Meanwhile, you’ll have to do with these images of the conference by Solen Feyissa, a Ph.D. student in Learning Technologies at the University of Minnesota. Solen’s own paper was entitled, “Contextualizing Educational Uses of Information Communication Technologies inside and outside of Ethiopian Classrooms.”– Sean Jacobs.

The program notes for “Africanizing Technologies” makes the point that Africa has long been a space of technological innovation and adaptation despite popular Western media depictions to the contrary. As the organizers write, “ . . . Africa is at the center of global technology stories such as the history of nuclear proliferation” and its people have adopted and remixed older technologies such as studio photography and cars, with a consequent “ . . . rich and complicated social impacts.” The conference was driven by the questions: “How is technology rooted in a longer history of African experiences? How do the emerging technological cultures on the continent contribute to our broader understandings of health, education, and social change? How does Africanizing Technology reshape our scholarly understandings of development? Can we speak of a broader pattern of Africanizing Technology in the current global circulation of digital media and other technologies?”