[STS-Africa] *Kronos* Call for Papers for Special Issue on The Micro-Politics of Knowledge

[Norman Schräpel]

Dear all,

I would like to draw your attention the following Call for Contributions (Special Issue on The Micro-Politics of Knowledge). We should have the chance to discuss possible contributions at our upcoming conference Mapping Science and Technology in Africa in Johannesburg. 

Best,
Norman.
___
Call for Papers, Kronos: Southern African Histories 2015

“The Micro-Politics of Knowledge”

Nancy Jacobs, Andrew Bank, and Shirley Brooks

It is now axiomatic that not all knowledge is science, that collaboration in knowledge production does not require consensus, and that science did not require that all parties assent to the same agenda. Knowing, being an expert, and relating to other experts, are intensely political in ways that escape determination by the macro-politics of the state, economics, or religion.  
Taking the position that knowledge becomes power through negotiation and effort, we propose a special issue of Kronos for 2015 on “The Micro-Politics of Knowledge.” This issue will bring together a broad range of articles on the varied politics of knowledge within southern Africa about southern African subjects, both human and natural, over the longue durée.  The subject is ancient: a politics between insiders with esoteric knowledge and newcomers with powerful technologies also predated colonialism and modern science.  Turning to the more recent past, scientific research has been conducted by a diverse group of actors who cooperate, compete, and circulate resources without necessarily sharing consensus about the meaning of the work. Greater recognition of this long and varied history has particular importance for Africa, where the politics of knowledge have often been seen as spun from the politics of empire and where the history of science is not thoroughly connected to the pre-colonial past.

For this special issue, the editors seek articles on subjects including, but not restricted to, ritual practices; technologies of production; medicine; mineral, plant and animal knowledge; the social sciences, linguistics, and even theology.  The workscapes can include quotidian human spaces such as furnaces and forges, shrines, hunting grounds, initiation huts, laboratories, the “field,” museums, libraries, academic centers, as well as bureaucratic, commercial, and patent offices. Actors may include patrons, scientists, support workers, vernacular informants, and autochthonous adepts.  Micro-negotiations between these parties may result in stability or displacement of what is held to be true.  Understandings will be appropriated and excluded and authorities will be elevated or denigrated. Much of the tension in these relationships has to do with gatekeeping among people—landlord stranger, imperial-colonized, or black-white—yet non-human subjects, including ancestors, pathogens, plants, and animals, may also act in influential ways. Analyses of these micropolitics will seek to understand the meaning of these interactions in small-scale everyday arenas that shape and are shaped by the actors’ own understandings. 

We anticipate a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, including micro-historical, archaeological, linguistic, feminist, post-colonial, and actor-network theory. We encourage authors to draw and discuss models from other disciplines and other regions that contribute to the understanding of knowledge as negotiated. As a state-of-the-field synthesis of the history of knowledge over the long term, this special issue will be of great interest to southern Africanists. Yet, we envision its contribution going beyond this region. Because of its wealth, prominence in the global imagination, political distance from Europe, and the marked heterogeneity of actors, the history of knowledge in southern Africa is particularly fraught.  We expect that specialists in other regions will find the analyses instructive.

To propose a paper, please contact one of the editors, preferably by 15 March, 2014:

Nancy Jacobs, Department of History, Brown University Nancy_Jacobs at brown.edu

Andrew Bank, Department of History, University of the Western Cape, bankmacher at telkomsa.net

Shirley Brooks, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of the Western Cape,sbrooks at uwc.ac.za

 
The deadline for submissions will be January 2015.


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