afrotecha.urban, supported by the Robert Bosch Stiftung is a growing research collective shapeshifting around a curiosity in the multiple technologies young people use to establish lives in African cities. At a time of increased global attention on this region’s exploding youth demographic, afrotecha.urban explores the under-examined technology narratives and practices emerging from the African continent. afrotecha.urban is interested in engaging with young people, on their own terms, and experimenting at the intersection of youth, technology, and urban justice to understand how youth and technology are (re)arranging the way urban residents work, learn, organise, connect, make and play.
As an applied research collective that is curious about youth-led and tech-enabled urban justice, we are committed to ensuring that our research is grounded, collaborative, creative and speculative. In order to do this, we believe that our collective needs to include and draw inspiration from many life, practice and intellectual worlds. We invite street technologists, techno-feminists, transcendentalists, ethical hackers, hustlers, activists, DJ’s, artists, city official champions and allies, storytellers, histo-futurists, influencers, cheeky coders, civic tech pioneers, spiritual healers/ mystics, meme lords, sci fi writers, drag queens, sentient robots, renegade archivists, subversive methodologists, transgressive technologies, to join us.
Goals
Goal 1: Surfacing and sharing information about initiatives doing transformative justice-oriented work at the intersection of youth and technology in African cities.
Goal 2: Identifying, sense-making and storying trends, patterns and threads across the initiatives, high level reports and policies, and youth+tech in Africa research, as the basis for the action lab design.
Goal 3: Experimenting with youth-led and tech-enabled concepts, methods, and practices with interdisciplinary teams (including youth, technicians, scholars, decision-makers) in a series of action labs.
Goal 4: Collaborating transformatively through redressing inequalities in research arrangements through first, by de-centering the locus of intellectual power to Africa; second, by including and supporting young ‘rising star’ scholars; and third, by engaging African youth in project decision-making.
Team
Aidan Africa * Daanyaal Loofer * Gathanga Ndung’u * Jill Samukimba * Khanya Mncwabe * Naadira Patel * Naomi Roux * Rike Sitas * Russel Hlongwane * Tselane Moiloa
Follow us on Instagram: @afrotecha.urban
