Jethron Ayumbah Akallah

Jethron holds a Bachelor of Education (Arts) degree (First Class Honours) and Master of Arts (History), both from Maseno University, Kenya. He has a PhD in History of Technology from Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. His research focuses on water and sanitation technology in Nairobi, with a special interest in innovations within informal areas. Employing the concepts of co-production and post-coloniality, his research breaks away from the history of technology that focuses on invention and origin by narrowing down on use, meaning and effect (Arnold, 2005). Jethron, through his research, lays emphasis on the need to approach the Global South as technological spaces rather than as sources of technological data. He draws inspiration from works of Zimbabwean scholar and historian Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga that include; The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production (2018), What Do Science, Technology and Innovation Mean for Africa? (2017) and Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (2015). In 2019, Jethron published his PhD dissertation titled; In the Technological Footprints of Urbanity: A Socio-political History of Water and Sanitation in Nairobi, 1899-2015 (https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/8550/). He has written two chapters on Kenya’s colonial and post-colonial political history in two books edited by the doyen of Kenyan history, the late Professor William Robert Ochieng’. Jethron currently holds the International Scholars Award 2019/2020 by the Society of History and Technology (SHOT).