Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga: "What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation mean from Africa"?

UM-trained MIT Prof Clapperton Mavhunga still stirring it up: "I look at science, technology and innovation today and i'm sure you would agree, they are very reductionist. Science is a social activity...and i'm saying this at Google but it's as if technology were just gadgets...is it that obvious? Or could it be that ... in reducing it to gadgets we are missing out on something else? The same with innovation, reduced to a very commercialized idea."

His questions about what makes it into curricula, what is deemed "knowledgeable" in an era of "Africa rising" cannot be urgently enough circulated and contested. His stretch to suture together historical work with these "key words of their time" for a next generation continues to be quite a lift for a young scholar. His interrogation of how heroes are made for Africa, then and now, and the notion of heroism, seems salutary as many of us scholars and teachers scramble after attention from the Africas' and the Americas' wealthiest tech entrepreneurs in ways that make them into de facto heroes (and/or villains) of our era.

Some of his advice?  "The best way to be effective in the world is to be humble before knowledge. Don't act as though you monopolize the space of common sense and reason."   Go blue!

His concerns? Africa has many exquisite critical thinkers and many who get things done in practice. But we need to continue bringing these two together; making those who excel in practice more critically aware, and critics more engaged in actual doing and building of things. Let us keep building the spaces where those twain shall meet. Proud of my UM colleagues doing this now in Ethiopia, Ghana, Gabon, and here at home with our upcoming Galaxy event linking our campus to the social and environmental matrices around us through getting key practices linked with critical concepts and into curricula, both at home and abroad!