[STS-Africa] CFP: Making Scientific Capacity in Africa, Cambridge, 13-14 June 2014

[Noemi R. Tousignant]

Making Scientific Capacity in Africa: An Interdisciplinary Conversation

@CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 13 June 2014 - 14 June 2014

Convened by Ruth J. Prince, Noémi Tousignant, Branwyn Poleykett,
Henrietta Moore and P. Wenzel Geissler

The organisers invite abstracts of 500 words and an author biography
(incl. institutional affiliation) of 150 words. Those and any
inquiries should be submitted via email to capacityinafrica at gmail.com
by 31 March 2014.

Large-scale initiatives by key institutions that support scientific
work in Africa, like Wellcome Trust, Royal Society, DFID, and Gates
and Rockefeller Foundation aim at, or require as an integrated
component, the reinforcement of institutional, academic and individual
scientific capacity – notably in fields like medicine and agriculture.
Capacity is a goal shared by a diversity of African actors and their
collaborators across disciplines. As a pragmatic strategy to improve
wellbeing, an ethical commitment to fair and sustainable
collaborations, or a political project to reverse long histories of
spatial imbalances of power, knowledge and resources, capacity appears
as an unambiguous good. And yet it raises unanswered – indeed, often
unasked – questions about how scientific infrastructure and activity
emerge from and act on social, institutional and material processes as
they unfold within specific locations and histories

These are concrete questions pertaining to how capacity should be
defined, planned for and invested in, as much as they raise
theoretical issues about the imbrications of knowledge and technology
with space, power, lives and materiality. Should funds be invested in
universities or hospitals, people or equipment, training or
infrastructure? How are entities such as institutions, people and
apparatus connected and animated – by skill but also motivation,
imagination and aspiration – as capacity to create and mobilize
knowledge? What traces have past scientific circulations and
collaborations left; how do current capacity-building initiatives
attempt to build on or break away from these legacies, and what do
they achieve? How and to what extent can scientific capacity transform
African futures?
This two-day workshop will elicit and discuss questions such as these
by bringing together leading actors of major capacity-building
programmes with social scholars of science, technology and medicine in
Africa. This conversation between the sciences, social sciences and
humanities should allow a critical examination of capacity, but also
invites the elaboration of new ways of sharing concerns, knowledge and
analytical tools across disciplinary and institutional groups

Contributions from the natural and health sciences as well as from the
social sciences and humanities are welcome, particularly addressing
the questions below:

1. What is capacity; does it reside in minds, objects, networks; how
is it tied to geographical place; how does it move and get moved; for
what practical and moral ends; towards which un/intended long and
short-term effects; what pasts does it remember and what futures does
it anticipate?

2. What can we learn from past experiences of capacity building and
transfer, from the mid-20th century to the present? What did these
initiatives leave behind in people, structures and material remains?

3.  How can the topic of capacity as a joint endeavour promote new
forms of exchange between science, social science and the humanities,
enabling the collaborative shaping of capacity-building programmes
from planning through to evaluation?

Confirmed speakers include:

Professor David Dunne, Pathology, Cambridge
Professor Julie Livingston, Rutgers University
Professor Wapu Mulwafu, Dean of the College of Social Science,
University of Malawi

Professor Iruka Okeke, Haverford College
Professor Sharon Peacock, Medicine, Cambridge
Professor Peter Redfield, University of North Carolina
Professor Claire Wendland, University of Wisconsin
Professor James Wood, Veterinary Science, Cambridge
Professor Nelson Sewankambo, Makerere School of Health Sciences, Uganda