Call for Participation: Strategic Narratives of Technology and Africa

Strategic Narratives of Technology and Africa

The conference brings scholars, technologists, and cultural producers together on the island of Madeira: a European territory off the coast of Africa, a historical site of mutual entanglement between the Atlantic continents, and a point of departure for European expansion. Here we’ll strategize ways to revisit, reframe, and recode the future of technology on and for both continents.

What can African theorists, technologists, and cultural producers do to generate alternatives to the influx of neocolonial narratives of tech entrepreneurship? What are key epistemologies and ways of being which are endemic in Africa that should be offered to the world through new systems and processes? How can an African information economy avoid the dynamics of the resource curse, where connectivity is extractive and exercised upon African citizens rather than by and through them? What can Western technologists do differently, and what are the spaces for collaboration?

This conference aims to reinvestigate these relationships and more in order to engender dialog between African and Western audiences and participants, who should leave Madeira equipped with new strategies and new collaborative partnerships.

We are accepting papers, creative works, and technologies that explore or demonstrate alternative socio-technical approaches. Contributions should be grounded in analysis and move toward synthesis: we hope to paint the “art of the [radical] possible” and generate new threads and pathways for the development of fresh technologies.

Deadline for submission: May 1

Conference dates: September 1 & 2