African knowledge production happened through movement and labor rather than sealed laboratories
Evidence
Mavhunga’s history of African knowledge production in colonial Zimbabwe argues that tsetse-fly control programs constituted a “mobile workshop” of indigenous and Western expertise — knowledge production happens through movement, encounter, and labor, not from sealed laboratories. Methodologically, the book combines environmental history with STS. For doctoral candidates, Mavhunga’s work offers an essential template for thinking about non-Western technoscience, with implications for AI ethics’ default Eurocentrism. — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 1190
Categorization
- SEED: The “mobile workshop” concept is a portable angle for an essay on decolonizing AI ethics and knowledge production beyond the laboratory.
- DEFINE: Introduces a specific, useful notion — the mobile workshop — as an alternative to the laboratory model of knowledge production.
- XREF: connects to: African thought is the reflected science of lived life grounded in culture; Science escaped time monopolies of knowledge but succumbed to space monopolies — Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, 804; Knowledge production now structures social order as labor once did — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 582 (+1 more)