Focus: Rethinking Technological Universality with Kranzberg's Laws

This essay revisits Melvin Kranzberg's laws from a Latin American perspective to question claims to technological universalism. It argues that technology should be understood as a historical and situated practice shaped by local, transboundary, and contested knowledges rather than as an object that simply diffuses across contexts. Focusing on Kranzberg's fourth, fifth, and sixth laws, the essay argues that technological universality is produced through translation, adaptation, and epistemic disputes, not through simple transfer. Colonial and contemporary hierarchies have privileged knowledge from the Global North while marginalizing Indigenous, rural, popular, and Afro-descendant forms of knowing. Against these hierarchies, the essay proposes a relational history of technology for Latin America that is attentive to power, geography, and knowledge circulation. Universality thus emerges not through homogenization but negotiated encounters among diverse knowledge systems and social actors.