• Séminaire

Anna Katharina Osterlow au séminaire Socio-histoire de l'informatique

Le 13 avril 2026, le séminaire Socio-histoire de l'informatique accueille Anna Katharina Osterlow. Son exposé a pour titre « Training “The African vanguard of the computer age”: early computing and visions of modernity and independence in Senegal and Nigeria, 1963-1984».

L'intervenante présentera le projet Computers in Education lancé en 1982 au Sénégal en collaboration avec la France et les Etats-Unis, interrogeant les biais occidentaux dans ce projet et les spécificités de l'histoire africaine de l'informatique (séance en anglais).

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  • Le 13 avr. 2026

  • 15:00 - 17:00

  • Séminaire
  • UTC-Paris 62 boulevard Sébastopol 
    75003 Paris

    (Salle Danielle Quarante [IMI/IMI-QUARAN])

Abstract

In March 1982, an ambitious, transnational group of teachers, scientists, and computer experts from Senegal, France, and the United States launched the project “Computers in education” at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Dakar, Senegal, to explore the usage of micro-computers in teaching and learning. The exchanges within the transnational network of experts around this project raised questions about the “Westernness” of technology, the appropriate ways to spread computing knowledge adapted to Senegalese culture, and the conditions of exporting computer hardware from the Global North to the Global South. Similar questions were raised in a much earlier computer project in 1964 in Nigeria, where International Business Machines (IBM) established the “African Education Centre”, in cooperation with the University of Ibadan, to train students from different African countries on an IBM punch card computer. While evoking similar questions on modernity and computing, this project brought forward Nigerian aspirations of linking computing with the efforts of nation-building and decolonisation, and it was announced as a symbol for the path that the African continent would take. Considering the changing practices of computing over the years, my research investigates the entanglements between French and US American state and private actors with African academics, functionaries, teachers, and computer scientists, from the 1960s to the late 1980s, in their ambitions to spread computing. Thereby, my research intends to shed light on the “silence” surrounding African computing history and its embeddedness in the global dynamics of decolonisation and the Cold War. My research is based on archival materials from archives in France, Senegal, Nigeria, and the US.

UTC Paris

UTC-Paris 62 boulevard Sébastopol, 75003 Paris

Salle Danielle Quarante [IMI/IMI-QUARAN]

UTC Paris
UTC-Paris
62 boulevard Sébastopol
75003 Paris