Workshop: STS research on Africa and from Africa

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

This workshop will highlight and address the structural challenges faced by STS scholars and their scholarship from, on, and about the continent of Africa. The conference will contribute to increasing knowledge in the field by bringing together the disparate communities of scholarship on African STS, integrating insights from studying Biomedicine, the Environment and Information and Communication Technologies. By increasing participation of uniquely African perspectives in the creation of STS knowledge about the continent, the workshop will deepen our insights on various processes of science, technology and innovation on the African continent. The core question of the workshop is this: What are the boundaries of Science and Technology in Africa and how should we recognize and address both the uniqueness of African knowledge production and innovation on the one hand, and the potential that STS work in Africa has to offer to the field as a whole on the other? By bringing together a diverse group of STS scholars who work in and on the African continent before the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) meeting, the workshop will create the institutional pressure for the society to more fully engage with African STS scholarship. The workshop will also affect the field as a whole by generating new scholarly agendas to expand the visibility of STS research in and on Africa. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.