Janice Ndegwa

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

Indigenous Expertise, Inventive Uses of Language, and Practical Experience as Archives of Technological Knowledge: Insights from Youth in Cameroon

Conventional neoliberal narratives about science and technology present simplistic dichotomies positing a scientific ‘West’ against an improvisational ‘Africa’. These narratives promote problematic assumptions about Africans’ capacity for scientific knowledge production and practice. Through participant observation and informal conversations, this research will explore how young Cameroonians draw on local knowledge based on indigenous expertise, inventive uses of multiple languages, and practical experience to develop, adapt and repair technologies to support their agricultural, income-generating, and environmental sustainability efforts and to contribute to community well-being. By centering the aspirations and experiences of young Africans, this study highlights the efficacy of decolonial narratives of technology.

Janice Ndegwa, Department of History

Janice is a first year PhD student in history at Stanford. She studies the history of science and technology, religion, mobilities, and the environment in East and Central Africa. She is particularly interested in locating contemporary technological developments within longer regional histories by examining the region's technological entanglements, mobilities, and environmental changes from the eighteenth century into the present. Ndegwa is passionate about participatory and emancipatory processes of knowledge production, acquisition, and dissemination, especially at the grassroots, and how they translate into personal and social transformation. Using interdisciplinary approaches, she has explored these themes within the fields of education, global health and development, gender and women’s studies, and agriculture and environmental sustainability, through academic and professional experiences in the US, UK Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Rwanda, Mauritius, and Israel. She holds a BA in history and African studies from Mount Holyoke College, USA and an MSc in global health and development from University College London, UK.

Return to past recipients of graduate student research funding