Vita
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at MIT and a visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is the first graduate of the University of Michigan’s Science, Technology & Society (STS) Program and one of few African scholars trained in and publishing at the intersection of African History and STS. He has published many articles and book chapters, including "Vermin Beings." Prof. Mavhunga is the author of Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2014), and has just finished his second book, tentatively entitled What Does Science Mean from Africa? A View from Dzimbahwe and an edited volume entitled What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? At MIT he teaches courses such as Africa for Engineers; Technology and Innovation in Africa; Technology in History; and Energy, Environment, and Society. His next two book projects focus on African Chemistry and an edited volume on Global South Epistemologies of Science, Technology, and Innovation, which he will also offer as a graduate seminar.
Dated from 2016
Fields of research
Science and Technology, Technology in History, African History, Environmental History
Publications
Monographs
Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2014)
What Does Science Mean from Africa? A View from Dzimbahwe (MIT Press, in press, expected 2016)
Edited Books
What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? (MIT Press, under review, expected 2016/2017)
Articles
2013 “Cidades Esfumaçadas: Energy and the Rural-Urban Connection in
Mozambique,” Public Culture 25 (2): 261-271.
2012 “Which Mobility for (Which) Africa? Beyond Banal Mobilities,” T2M Yearbook: 73-84.
2011 “Vermin Beings: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game,” Social Text 29 (1): 151-176.
2009 With Marja Spierenburg, “Transfrontier Talk, Cordon Politics: the
Forgotten History of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in Southern
Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 35, 3 (2009): 715-735.
2009 “The Glass Fortress: Zimbabwe’s Cyber-Guerrilla Warfare,” Journal of International Affairs 62 (2): 159-173.
2007 With Marja Spierenburg, “A Finger on the Pulse of the Fly: Hidden
Voices of Colonial Anti-Tsetse Science on the Rhodesia and Mozambique
Borderlands, 1945-56,” South African Historical Journal (58): 117-141.
2007 “Big Game Hunters, Bacteriologists, and Tsetse Fly Entomology in
Colonial Southeast Africa: The Selous-Austen Debate Revisited, 1905-1940s,” ICON (12): 75-117.
2007 With Wolfram Dressler, “On the Local Community: The Language of
Disengagement?” Conservation and Society 5 (1): 44-59.
2007 Barbara Tapela, Lamson Maluleke, and Clapperton Mavhunga, “New
Architecture, Old Agendas: Perspectives on Social Research in Rural
Communities Neighbouring the Kruger National Park,” Conservation and Society 5 (1): 60-87.
2003 “Firearms Diffusion, Exotic and Indigenous Knowledge Systems in the
Lowveld Frontier, South Eastern Zimbabwe, 1870-1920,” Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 1 (2): 201-231.
2002 “If they are as Thirsty as all that, Let them Come Down to the Pool’:
Unearthing Wildlife History and Reconstructing Heritage in Gonarezhou
National Park, from the late 19th century to the 1930s,” Historia 47 (2):
531-558.
Chapters in Books
2012 “Mobility and the Making of Animal Meaning: The Kinetics of ‘Vermin’
and ‘Wildlife’ in Southern Africa,” in Georgina Montgomery and Linda
Kalof, eds., Making Animal Meaning. Cambridge: Michigan State
University Press, pp. 17-43.
2011 “A Plundering Tiger with its Deadly Cubs? The USSR and China as
Weapons in the Engineering of a 'Zimbabwean Nation,’ 1945-2009,” in
Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics
in the Global Cold War. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 231-66.
2011 “Mugabe, Robert,” in Henry Louis Gates and Emmanuel Akyeampong,
ed., Dictionary of African Biography. New York: Oxford University Press.
2011 “The Colony in Us, the Colony as Us,” in Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and
James Muzondidya, eds., Redemptive or Grotesque Nationalism?
Rethinking Contemporary Politics in Zimbabwe. Bern: Peter Lang, pp.
349-380.
Other Publications
2014 with Helmuth Trischler, eds., Energy (and) Colonialism, Energy
(In)Dependence: Africa, Europe, Greenland, North America. Munich:
Rachel Carson Perspectives, in press,
http://www.environmentandsociety.org/perspectives/2014/5/energyand-colonialism-energy-independence-africa-europe-greenland-northamerica.
2014 “Seeing the National Park from Outside It: On an African Epistemology
of Nature,” in Christof Mauch and Libby Robin, eds., The Edges of
Environmental History: Honouring Jane Carruthers. Munich: RCC
Perspectives, pp. 53-60,
http://www.environmentandsociety.org/perspectives/2014/1/edgesenvironmental-history-honouring-jane-carruthers.
2014 “What is Innovation in African Terms?” Interview with Eusebius
McKaiser on Power FM, South Africa, July 18th,
http://www.powerfm.co.za/podcasts/what-is-innovation-in-africanterms/.
2012 “Incoming Technology and African Innovation,” Carson Fellow Portraits
(Video Series), http://www.carsoncenter.unimuenchen.de/alumni/former_fellows/clappertonmavhunga/video/index.html.
2007 “Even the Rider and a Horse are a Partnership: a Reply to Vermeulen
and Sheil,” Oryx 41 (4): 441-442.
Book Reviews
2007 Review of Lynnette A. Jackson, Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social
Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908-1968 (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 2005) in H-Africa.
2007 Review of Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005) in Comparative Studies in
Society and History 49 (4): 1013-1014.
In Press
2014 “Organic Vehicles and Passengers: Sarungano’s Tsetse Fly as Transient
Analytical Workspace,” Transfers (accepted, in press).