Technology with a human face: African and Western profiles

INSIDE INDONESIA, 2023

2016

Technologies are the result of an engineering that harvests scientific knowledge and understanding to be applied to design, development and use of materials, systems and processes for specific purposes. These means of technology production are commonly regarded as clinical, apolitical and neutral. But are they? This address questions the positionality of dominant knowledge and understanding that inform technology production. It unveils an implicit practice of 'othering', sustained through Orientalism. Fromthe review of narratives in 'technology for development', this addressshows how many contemporary technologies link in with thought and workpositioned in the Global North. This positionality of appliedknowledge through technologies deployed in Africa, the address argues, indicates epistemic violence. As a result, dominant technologies –also for development – tend to empower academic and business interestsoutside of the African continent. From the position that all professionals are personally responsible for their collective and individual, partial perspectives – a locatedview, based somewhere – this address infers that sustainabledevelopment and their technological artefacts necessitate input fromAfrican research, addressing issues through African epistemologies and local practices. Solidly embedded in African values and epistemologies, an African academy and engineering can contribute and participate as an equal partner in the global society.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2006

Studies in Sociology of Science, 2010

The aim of this paper is to apply the hermeneutic approach to social imaginaries of science and technology. Special attention will be given to discuss how the techno-scientific system intends to face poverty, although the system focuses to a different direction, which is a growing inter-penetration with the economic system. The techno-scientific system, as well as its politics, sets aside poor people. In such a context, the scientific-technologic gap continues to grow, generating gradually two different paces of international development. Factors like the cyborgization, robotization, the development of ITCs, etc., have an impact into the poorest regions, ending up into situations of technologic-scientific neo-colonialism. In spite of peripheral states efforts, the possible development of these regions is an always faced and never overcome challenge. Transformations of the scientific-technologic system, which are more and more scientifically and technologically dependent every day, constitute as a gap.

2010

Early American Studies scholars had little interest in modernization theories of the sort propagated in the 1950s and 1960s. These used European and American history to justify a progressive view of development from local, largely oral cultures toward literate societies organized into democratic, industrialized nation-states. Such approaches–then popular in the social sciences and informing the practices of international development organizations–have since been discredited as Eurocentric and historically unfounded.

Telematics and Informatics, 1984

The leadership of Western nations in technology development, especially in telecommunications continues to be strengthened. But where does the third world fit into this high-tech scenario. Many experts believe that Western communication technologies can allow developing countries to leapfrog over the industrial age. However, this article points out that unless third world countries can develop their own infrastructure, skills and knowledge base, competing with Western nations for them could become technological Blind Man's Bluff. Fritz Machlup, the economist, quotes Clark Kerr as saying that "knowledge has certainly never in history been so central to the conduct of an entire society" and that the "knowledge industry" may well "serve as the focal point for national growth" in the second half of this century, and that "the university is at the center of the knowledge process". ~ This article describes the investment of human resources and capital in knowledge production centers, such as universities, because we have discerned a causal connection between the production of certain kinds of knowledge, namely technology, and economic growth. The Arthur Clarke Center (ACC) or the Sri Lanka Center for Modern Technologies is designed to be such a knowledge production center which will play an important role in the economic growth of developing countries. Knowledge production costs money. The U.S. Federal Agency's total Research and Development budget for 1982 (actual) was $40,036.6 million. 2 The Vice President of the National Academy of Engineering, Dr. Ralph Landau, has claimed that "from one-third to one-half of the growth of the American economy from about 1870 to the present (i.e., roughly 100 years) has come from technological change; the rest was distributed between capital and human investment. However, over shorter time periods, the contribution of technological change has been much greater". 3 It is not just a coincidence that other advanced countries have also invested significantly in science and technology. Science itself, by discovering new truths about causality which replace old truths, provides the propositional knowledge base which permits the development of innovative procedural knowledge or technological knowhow. 4 The new technologies are "drawn from an entirely new scientific base which bears little resemblance to the science that engineers and scientists learned even three decades ago. Today, one deals with Mr Naren Chitty is presently Counsellor at the Sri Lankan Embassy in Washington, DC. He was formerly Consultant to the Ministry of State in Sri Lanka and was a member of the interministerial committee which formulated the Arthur Clarke Center project proposal.

This talk is meant as an intellectual recommendation on how not to approach Africa, on one hand, and how to train one's eye to be aware of innovation where there might appear to be none. For, before we can engage Africa, it is always important to be sensitive about where the continent, in all its 54-country diversity, is coming from-historically, culturally, and technologically. The biggest impediment to any engagement with Africa is to pretend that history does not matter. It does. From the trans-Atlantic slave trade through European colonialism to perceived and actual official Western obstruction of liberation struggles, to the legacies of colonial transportation infrastructures that lead to the global north but do not promote intra-Africa trade, to trade imbalances within the World Trade Mavhunga WHAT IS AFRICA IN TECHNOLOGY? All copyrights belong to the author. 2 Organization that remain undecolonized, there has been a history of negative engagement between Africa and Western countries. This is in contrast to the choices that the east (China and before then the Soviet Union) and other countries of the south took in support of Africa against colonialism, which casts them as friends in the eyes of Africa, or the sense of Japan as a victim of nuclear war, and India as a comrade-in-arms post-Bandung 1956. The starting points for engagement with Africa from Beijing, Moscow, Delhi, and Tokyo are different from those of Washington, London, Brussels, or Paris.

Journal of International Development, 1990

Work, Learning and Sustainable Development, 2009

Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2019