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- Convenors:
-
Ann Cassiman
(University of Leuven)
Charles Piot (Duke University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Anthropology (x) Futures (y)
- Location:
- Neues Seminargebäude, Seminarraum 14
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 May, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel wishes to focus on how different forms of 'making' and learning in the broad sense bear affinity to the locally existing ways of knowing and learning and in how far they offer alternative possibilities that may or may not lead to 'better' futures and how.
Long Abstract:
This panel wishes to look into how locally embedded forms of making and learning inform young people's pathways towards 'making' their futures in African cities, particularly in low-income neighbourhoods where those futures are often highly uncertain. We aim at better understanding people's strategies and navigations within their day-to-day circumstances, and how a lack of access to formal education, jobs, and materials informs choices made and routes taken as alternative, and sometimes decolonial, responses to their often-precarious situations.
From coding schools to seamstresses' workshops to the mobile phone repair market, young people within Africa's urban worlds find ways to 'hack' infrastructures such as digital infrastructures, formal educational systems and social security. This panel wishes to shed light on how different forms of making and learning bear affinity to the locally existing ways of knowing and learning and in how far they offer alternative possibilities that may or may not lead to jobs and 'better' futures; also, what this means for the job market and the understanding of 'work' in these specific contexts. The panel wishes to focus on the various ways in which 'making' and 'making do' strengthens old profiles of social exclusion or along which lines new modes of inclusion or exclusion are drawn.
We invite papers from academics and from 'makers', with a focus on different forms of making and learning in so-called 'makerspaces' in the broad sense, such as crafts apprenticeships, as well as the more recently introduced ones based off the Euro-American Maker Movement.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 May, 2023, -Janine Patricia Santos (KU Leuven)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore the role of errors and mistakes in learning through prototyping, as captured by the stories of engineering students, mobile phone apprentice-repairers and the digitally-inclined youth of Lomé's 'makerspaces' in their quest to put ideas to materiality as they imagine them.
Paper long abstract:
Prototyping is an in-vogue concept in Lomé’s makerspaces, as influenced by the globalised Euro-American Maker Movement that promote them. Toying with 3D printers and modelling software, Lomé’s digitally-inclined youth test their ideas through prototyping in makerspaces such as Ecotec Lab and WoeLab, which provide prototyping workshops and materials for students to use outside of their theoretically-oriented schools and universities. For the prototyping workshop facilitators, prototyping is a way to translate ideas to materiality and learn by making mistakes (l’apprentissage par l’erreur). But learning through mistakes is not only confined to the Euro-American influenced ‘makers’ of Lomé, they can also be seen in various forms of apprenticeships, such as with the mobile phone repairers in Lomé’s mobile phone market Dékon.
In this paper, I explore the role of errors and mistakes in learning through prototyping. Through stories of engineering students building elevator prototypes, mobile phone apprentice-repairers dismantling and reassembling broken phones, and kids building prototype gyroscopes as part of their summer workshop experience, I illustrate how errors and mistakes can be essential to solidifying an idea to its material form and are often more encouraged and celebrated instead of being met with frustration. Additionally, I argue that the malleability of the prototype as an unfinished product, as a figure of ‘compossibility’ (Corsín Jiménez 2014), allows for the students, apprentices and makers to explore the full potential of their ideas and enhance their skills, as they make and remake prototypes according to how they imagine them.
Nele Van Doninck (KU Leuven)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at how new forms of digital learning through content freely available on the Internet, such as on Google, Youtube or TikTok, offer new opportunities for people from a low-income neighborhood in Nairobi, and how those pratices play out in a very local context of work and education.
Paper long abstract:
This paper argues that despite techno-utopian narratives of digital learning (through content freely available on the Internet), learning is a highly contextual practice, and through looking at a Community Based Organization (CBO) that offers tech trainings to young people from low-income neighborhoods in Nairobi, Kenya, I argue that digital learning does not replace formal education but rather is strategically incorporated into already existing practices of gathering, mixing and matching and ‘hustling’ opportunities to sustain oneself. The paper further argues that in such low-income neighborhoods learning and earning are inextricably entangled, and learning is thus always geared towards bettering one’s future in a very practical, locally embedded way. Lastly, the paper offers insights into how new global tech narratives and practices translate practically into very vernacular ways of trying to attain (formal) education and work opportunities through carefully strategizing what is available, online and offline.
Samwel Moses Ntapanta (Aarhus University)
Paper short abstract:
Technological determinism to e-waste recycling tends to view micro-scale, ingenious activities developing around e-waste, especially from the Global South, unpalatable. Hacking activities which spontaneously arise out of unregulated patches create platforms for potential un-projected urbanisation.
Paper long abstract:
Hacking defunct electronics (i.e. refurbishing, recycling, reusing and repairing) envisage a future through ingenuity and creativity employed by informal workers. All that is needed is to stretch our gaze beyond burning cables and dump sites and follow the material extracted from defunct devices as they are transformed, integrated and percolate into the city, the social, cultural, and economic activities. Hacking e-waste is not just compensational for lacking techno-infrastructure and ‘compensation for the lack of successful urbanisation’, African cities are complex and still saddled with colonial, post-colonial, and late capitalism ramifications. They appear not necessarily to follow any particular trajectory of urbanisation that confuses policymakers, let alone researchers. However, these complex ‘micro activities’ are valuable in building the city and the world.
This paper argues that the value extracted from e-scrap materials through informal labour not only supplements the poor waste management infrastructures in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Furthermore, they challenge models of e-waste governmentality copied from the Global North and pasted in the South. When infrastructure for waste management is absent or incapacitated, quotidian hacking activities arise to fill the vacuum by inserting localised knowledge to create livelihood out of what is discarded. This paper is about stretching our imagination and seeing the intersectionality of e-waste and lived experiences of the city-zens.
Donita Nshani Tata (University of liege)
Paper short abstract:
The taxi industry has become a means of social inclusion for those who might otherwise be excluded. People enter this area as a temporary business with the intention of finding better possibilities and more meaningful occupations in the future, but they end up becoming entrepreneurs in the sector.
Paper long abstract:
People, who have never had the chance to complete a formal education, are immigrating to a new city, are finishing school and unsure of employment, have early childhood obligations, or have lost their job face an uncertain future. While waiting for better times, some people in this category have sought temporary relief in the taxi sector, either as drivers or as car owners, especially among those who can depend on family or friends for help.
The purpose of this paper is to examine employment practises in the transportation business. Most actors start in the sector as a temporary business with the hope of finding greater opportunities and fulfilling jobs someday and finally climb the professional ladder and become taxi owners, while other actors find it frustrating. As a result, I examine these drivers' career paths, how they operate on a daily basis, the strategies employed to mitigate risk and evade governmental control, and how they finally become entrepreneurs in the sector. The results suggest that the taxi business has become a means of social inclusion for those who would otherwise been excluded. This research is based on my PhD ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2022 in Yaoundé, Cameroon.