IASC commons Nairobi

Panels proposals for the biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, June 19-24 2023 in Nairobi and online.

What about revitalising African knowledge commons for/through education?
Hosted by Barbara Class and Fabio Balli. Id 6.9. Submit a proposal.

⏪ Open Education

In this panel, we suggest to discuss knowledge commons beyond the 2030 agenda and beyond theories of development, within the framework of Open Science (UNESCO, 2021).

Leveraging epistemologies from the South, we explore how to move away from post-positivist approaches created by the Global North, first by recognising absences, and next by encouraging emergences of different knowledge systems (Santos, 2016).

How can overall life philosophies such as Maat or Ubu-ntu contribute to create alternative ways to education? How can educating in community languages empower learners towards a holistic cultural identity? How can leadership be developed to train individuals to become bridges, proficient of one local culture / language of the Global South and one of the North?

Taking advantage of the momentum and current awareness with regards to knowledge commons in Africa, i.e. topics that concern the Global South and are discussed in and for the Global South in journals hosted for instance on African Journals Online (AJOL), education is discussed in a much deeper sense than schooling, in temporalities that far exceed international agendas.

Finally, rather than addressing knowledge and natural commons as two different entities in the modern perspective (Latour, 2006), we consider them one and the same commons, in interaction, and nurturing one another. This with respect also to traditional ways of educating through initiation which take place in forests.

Open Source Hardware in the medical field
Hosted by Pascal Carpentier and Fabio Balli. Id 7.2. Submit a proposal.

⏪ Health and law-making

Over the past fifteen years, technological evolution allowed hobbyists and amateurs to gather, exchange information, and build innovative objects. They opened a new field of open source development; Open Source Hardware (OSH). A movement that aims to replicate the OSS model’s success but in the physical world with tangible resources.

Over the past years, Open hardware products’ complexity drastically increased from merely printed simple objects in 3D to very ambitious and complex projects like an Open MRI. Some projects became real commercial successes, like Arduino, selling more than ten million units of its multipurpose electronic board. However, the comparative advantage with the proprietary model is not yet fully understood, and globally, literature is lacking due to the relative youth of the development model.

The COVID pandemic recently acted as a catalyst for OSH projects that were suddenly under the spotlight worldwide. Communities helped healthcare workers to face the sanitary crisis with countless medical spare parts, respirators, or face shields projects. Although this common-based mode of production demonstrated a genuine capacity to propose pragmatical and decentralized solutions to this unprecedented situation of generalized supply chain disruption, a vast majority of these projects failed to reach the hospital bedside. These communities underestimated the gap between the willingness to share knowledge and functioning prototypes and a final product up and running in a hospital.