[STS-Africa] Conference ANN: Dreaming of Health and Science in Africa, 13-15 June, Hinxton, UK

[Noemi R. Tousignant]

Please post and circulate in the category conference announcement.Dreaming
of Health and Science in Africa: Aesthetics, Affects, Poetics and Politics

A conference to be held at Hinxton Hall, Wellcome Trust Conference Center,
UK (http://www.wtconference.org.uk/)
*June 13th to 15th 2015  *


Register by *May 8* 2015 by emailing: dreamingscience at gmail.com

Registration rates: *£* 63.60 per day (*£* 91.20 with dinner)

*Programme* :
https://africanbiosciences.wordpress.com/events/dreamingscience/


This conference seeks to open a conversation on forms of possibility and
violence that are enabled and take effect through dreams of health and
science in Africa. Dreams are often of transformation, critical of the
present and articulating alternative and imaginative futures towards which
expertise, knowledge and care might lead. Dreams can also engender violence
and turn into nightmares. Aspirations to health and advancement can be
stoked as fictions while their achievement is systematically postponed, or
trivialised as pipe-dreams, whittling down science and medicine to fit the
present tense of urgent priorities and scarce resources. Dreams can also
clash with each other, sparking violent contests over the future. Through
dreams good and bad, deferred, broken or attained, reached for and pushed
out of reach, tenacious and erased, forgotten and rekindled, we propose to
explore emerging and future possibilities for the study of medicine and
science in Africa.

We ask: can dreams help us reopen and critically examine the past and
potential horizons of possibility that have animated bio-scientific
activity in Africa? Dreaming and recapturing dreams together as historians,
anthropologists, geographers, scientists, architects and artists will
animate connections between politics and aesthetics, affective relations
and materiality, suggesting paths ahead for interdisciplinary inquiry. How
can we understand which, how and why futures for African science and health
have been delayed, narrowed and closed off, and to expand the boundaries,
of time and possibility, of current imaginations beyond the constraints of
“global health”?
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