Everyday language, as oral expression of the many transient workspaces that animate life in Africa, constitutes a rich philosophical space from which to initiate a view from the Global South, from Africa, and from each of our specific communities and produce a knowledge that is meaningful and usable to us. Everyday language expresses realities and imaginations at the intersection of the indigenous and the inbound and thus testifies to the creativities of the people who strategically deploy them. Language constitutes the only archive from which Africans can come to knowledge without a sense of intellectual inferiority; that is precisely why the French, British, Portuguese, and Germans made their languages the official languages of knowledge production and knowing under colonialism. Our conversations will invite each of us to go back to their languages, to recover meanings of things that have come to dominate contemporary life. We will concern ourselves with just five: science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. The conversations will be historical and contemporary; philosophical and methodological; and intellectual as well as applied. Fellows are invited to deploy all kinds of multimedia (forms of language and representation), textual, visual, sensory and otherwise, that show how Africans see, know, make, and consume in their own language.

About Clapperton C. Mavhunga 

Professor Mavhunga is an associate professor of Science, Technology and Society at MIT and a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow. His professional interests lie in the history, theory, and practice of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the international context, with a focus on Africa. He is the author of Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2014), and has just finished editing a volume entitled What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? which explores STI in Africa from an archaeological, historical, philosophical, anthropological, STS, engineering, development, and policymaking perspective. Mavhunga’s second monograph—on the tsetse fly as a site of African knowledge production—is finally finished after extensive further research and is expected late 2017 or early 2018. He is working with CODESRIA to improve capacity in African universities for the training of graduate and undergraduate students, especially in the area of STEM and the Social Sciences.