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STS Colloquium
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| The Community Water Jar: Gender and Technology in Guinea West Africa |
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Date:
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Friday March 7, 2008
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| Time: |
4:00 p.m. |
| Location: |
Miller Library
/ 014
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| Event type: |
Lecture |
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| Event Description: |
Wenda K. Bauchspies, Professor of STS and Women's Studies, Penn State University, "The Community Water Jar: Gender and Technology in Guinea West Africa."
Water remains a chaos until a creative story interprets its seeming equivocation as being the quivering ambiguity of life -- Ivan Illich. Clean water for drinking and washing is a necessity for life and good health; however, it is not readily available in many parts of West Africa. Mainly women and children (with some men) face "less than optimal conditions" and "enormous difficulties" in their daily search to access and collect water for drinking, bathing, washing, and cooking. My research describes the meaning and role of women, water and their technologies in a social, cultural and historical context over the last fifty years in urban West Africa. Through participant observation and household surveys of concessions in Guinea, I document the access to, collection and storage of water in order to describe the water realities experienced by individuals/families in a mid-sized West African city. Based upon in-depth interviews with female elders I explore the practices and applied knowledge used by water workers to maintaining standards of cleanliness and health for their families. My objective is to understand how "water knowledge" has been transferred, acquired, adapted, adopted, applied and produced by water workers in the everyday/night worlds of Guinean households and the implications of this knowledge for "modern life" and global development goals. |
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