Barefoot Engineers

The Non-Mobility of Knowledge in a Knowledge-Transfer Project

Bibliographic Data

ID12930680
AuthorsStewart Allen (0000-0003-0079-0738, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume13
Issue1
Publication date2011-02-15
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropology Matters (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1758-6453 • E-ISSN: 1758-6453
PublisherNomadIT (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.22582/am.v13i1.226
OpenAlexW1589519400
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited18

Knowledge transfer is an integral, yet oft neglected, component in the transfer of technology between different geographical and cultural milieus. This paper is based on fifteen months of participatory fieldwork within a CBO (community based organisation) in India that hosts up to thirty five participants at any one time from the ‘Least Developed Countries’ index to train them in the maintenance and repair of solar photovoltaic technologies. The trainees, all of whom are women, and ideally grandmothers, are instructed for six months, without a common medium of language instruction, in circuit board assembly, soldering, testing, maintenance and repair, through a ‘learning-by-doing’ process. After six months, the women return home to solar electrify their communities. In the following paper, I argue that knowledge is created and sustained dynamically through an on-going alignment of objects and symbols, gestures and bodies, identities and environment. Knowledge and meaning are not so much embedded or inscribed in these materials but rather performed through them in a dynamic coalescence of networked doing. By employing a network metaphor to describe the interplay of bodies and gestures, and not only material semiotic alliances, I hope to re-situate the centrality of lived interactions between persons and material objects in the dynamic becomings of network assemblages

Aesthetics · Art · Centrality · Citizen journalism · Epistemology · Gesture · Human–computer interaction · Inscribed figure · Knowledge management · Knowledge transfer · Linguistics · Meaning (existential · Metaphor · Semiotics · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Information Systems Theories and Implementation · Innovative Education and Learning Practices · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction · Artificial Intelligence

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