People

Annapurna Mamidipudi

Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow (Jun 2020–Feb 2026)

Dr.

Annapurna Mamidipudi was trained as an engineer in electronics and communications, in Manipal, in South India. She has set up an NGO that supported vulnerable craft livelihoods and worked with artisan production for nearly two decades in South India. She has trained herself in natural dyeing techniques that were slowly becoming extinct, and actively assisted production processes of artisan groups.

Annapurna’s thesis is titled “Towards theory of innovation for handloom weaving in India.” She was invited for a month to the University of Chicago’s prestigious Neubauer Collegium as a fellow. Currently she is employed at the University of Maastricht as a part time post doc to study responsible innovation.

She is an awardee of the Global Social Business Incubator program of Santa Clara University of 2009, member Timbaktu Collective’s General Body, which works in the drought prone district of Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh to support poor farmers with food security, and on the executive committee of the Craft Education and Research Centre at Kalakshetra, the premier Music and Dance institution, in Chennai. She is the producer of a musical opera, Pallaki Seva Prabandhamu, directed by renowned musician R. Vedavalli.

Her research interests include the study of traditional craft in the contemporary world, particularly handloom weaving as livelihood, as socio-technology and knowledge; sustainable agriculture, politics of development and the role of markets in sustaining traditional arts and crafts.

Current Projects

Color in Traditional Craft Practice in South India
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Completed Projects

Epistemologies of Craft
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Ownership of Knowledge
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Selected Publications

Mamidipudi, Annapurna and Dagmar Schäfer (2023). “Excavations of Knowledge Ownership: Theoretical Chapter.” In Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property, ed. D. Schäfer, A. Mamidipudi, and M. Buning, 15–44. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https…

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Schäfer, Dagmar, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Marius Buning, eds. (2023). Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property. Inside Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14648.001.0001.

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Schäfer, Dagmar and Annapurna Mamidipudi (2023). “Ownership of Knowledge: Introduction.” In Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Properly, ed. D. Schäfer, A. Mamidipudi, and M. Buning, 1–13. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551…

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Mamidipudi, Annapurna and Viven Murthy (2023). “Raga and the Problem of Ownership: Knowledge and Culture in Carnatic Music.” In Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property, ed. D. Schäfer, A. Mamidipudi, and M. Buning, 121–152. Cambridge,…

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Past Events

Exhibition

Berlin Science Week: The kn/own/able Project—Handloom Weaving as Knowing and Owning

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Working Group

Responsible Documentation and Conscious Outcomes: Explorations in the Ownership of Knowledge

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Roundtable

Of Materiality and Minds: Provocations in the History of Science Across Environments

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Lecture

Studies of Science & Technology: Torn Between Scholarship and Politics?

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Kolloquium

Thematic Cluster: Crafts and Innovation

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Nachrichten & Presse

The Kn/Own/Able Project—an initiative on knowledge and its ownership

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In Bildern: Forscher*innen präsentieren beim MPIWG Summer Publications Slam

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„Dissolving Agents as Technologies of Transformation in the Global South“-Workshop, 10.–11. Juli 2018. Einreichungsfrist: 31. Januar 2018.

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Public Communications Project

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