Dissertation Research: Conduits of Culture and Control: Roads, States, and Users in West-Central Africa, 1914 to 1980

这项科学和技术研究论文改进补助金研究了1914年至1980年非洲中西部道路的历史，分析了这种技术沿着其物质，政治和文化层面。该补助金主要支持访问出版的档案材料，出版的来源和执行口述历史的旅行，主要是在法国和中西部非洲，以揭示道路作为物质文物，政治工具和文化意义的所在地，所有这些都是通过非洲人和西方人有时冲突的机构建立的。 在整个世纪，各种道路作为西方人和非洲人相遇的主要场所或“接触区”变得越来越重要。 但西方人和非洲人都带来了他们自己的，有时差异很大的，对这些遭遇之路的假设和期望。 因此，揭示西方人和非洲人感知和使用道路的方式对于理解非洲和西方之间相遇的性质和影响以及理解技术在这些相遇中的复杂作用至关重要。 20世纪，非洲中西部道路的建设和维护带来了重大挑战，需要做出艰难的（也是发人深省的）决定。 研究人员将绘制出道路的技术，政治，社会和象征性方面都在殖民占领的过程中，作为独立后的非洲国家保持，扩大，并发现从殖民地政府继承的道路系统的新用途。 该项目还论证了道路这一特定技术的普遍和变革作用，不仅在政策层面上，而且在二十世纪非洲西方人和非洲人的日常生活和交往中。这篇论文，然后，包括非洲人的声音，以及西方人，谁不同地帮助建造或修理道路，生活在沿着（或远离）道路，并沿着沿着道路旅行。

This Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant examines the history of roads in West-Central Africa from 1914 to 1980, analyzing this technology along its material, political and cultural dimensions. The grant primarily supports travel to access published archival materials, published sources and to perform oral histories, primarily in France and West-Central Africa, in order to shed light on roads as material artifacts, political instruments, and the locus of cultural meanings, all built through the sometimes-clashing agency of Africans and Westerners. Over the course of the 20th century, roads of various sorts became increasingly important as a primary site or "contact zone" for encounters between westerners and Africans. But westerners and Africans each brought their own, sometimes widely differing, assumptions and expectations about roads to these encounters. Uncovering the ways both westerners and Africans perceived and used roads is thus crucial to understanding the nature and impact of encounters between Africa and the west, and to understanding the complex roles of technology in those encounters. The construction and maintenance of roads in west-central Africa during the 20th century posed significant challenges and entailed difficult (and revealing) decisions. The researcher will draw out the technological, political, social, and symbolic aspects of roads both over the course of the colonial occupation and as post-independence African nations maintained, expanded, and found new uses for road systems inherited from colonial governments. The project also argues for the pervasive and transforming role of a particular technology, roads, not only on a policy level but also in the day-to-day lives of and encounters between westerners and Africans in twentieth-century Africa. This dissertation, then, includes the voices of Africans, as well as westerners, who variously helped to build or repair roads, lived along (or away from) roads, and traveled along roads.