[STS-Africa] CFP - STS Africa Workshop - 4S Sydney

[Pollock, Anne]

*** Please submit and help spread the word to others in your networks! ***

STS Africa 2018:
An NSF-sponsored pre-4S Workshop on STS on/in Africa
Sydney, Australia – August 27-29, 2018

Organizers: Dr. Tolu Odumosu (University of Virginia); Dr. Anne Pollock (Georgia Tech)

This Workshop seeks to explore the question “What are the boundaries of Science and Technology in Africa and how should we recognize and address both the uniqueness of African knowledge production and innovation on the one hand, and the potential that STS work in Africa has to offer to the field as a whole on the other?” We hope to answer these questions by working across the three domains of information technology, medicine, and the environment as they relate to Africa.

As this is event is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and we are seeking additional support from other funding bodies, funds will be available to offset travel and accommodation expenses.  We anticipate being able to fully fund all travel expenses for participants coming from the African continent, and to be able to significantly defray the travel expenses for all participants.

We anticipate an intimate gathering of 24 participants, including at least 12 Africans (including at least 6 who are based at institutions in Africa).  The Workshop will be held in coordination with the Society for Social Studies of Science 4S-Sydney meeting.  The pre-4S events will be held at the University of Sydney, and will feature a keynote panel of prominent scholars on the topic of challenges and opportunities of doing STS work in Africa, roundtables on publishing at funding with guests from presses, journals, and funding institutions, and meals that will provide opportunities for networking and community-building.  On the first day of 4S, incorporated into the program of 4S proper, there will be a Closed Panel featuring stream of panels in response to an open CFP:  http://stsafrica2018.com/.

We seek submissions of abstracts in the following three areas:

Panel 1: Information Technology – In contemporary Africa, the music of modernity is the ring of the mobile phone. An Information Technology revolution has swept the continent especially with the adoption of the mobile phone, and in later years, the mobile internet. Multiple African STS scholars have examined the mobile phone as a particular information technology that is co-constituted with Africa (de Bruijn, Nyamnjoh, and Brinkman 2009; Zegeye and Muponde 2012, Odumosu 2017). For example, de Bruji, Nyamnjoh, and Brinkman examine emergent innovations and new practices around mobile telephony such as healing practices (van Beek 2009), engineering design (Odumosu 2017) and mobile money platforms (Donovan 2012).  We seek submissions that contribute to our understanding of information technology in Africa, in ways that might intersect with or depart from the other topical areas below.

Panel 2: Biomedicine – Similarly, much STS of Biomedicine in Africa has been in dialogue with Critical Global Health.  Clinical trials have been a particularly important site for consideration of power and knowledge (Crane 2013, Kelly and Geissler 2012).  In both the study of pharmaceuticals and the study of toxicology, Africa has also been part of the broader interrogation in STS of the tension in science between its claims to universality and its practice in particular places, because lab-based biosciences are figured as the most placeless and prestigious, and African scientists have challenged their exclusion (Okeke 2011, Pollock 2014, Tousignant 2013).  There has been important work challenging the figuration of Africa as lack (Mkhwanazi 2016).  We seek submissions that contribute to our understanding of biomedical technologies in Africa.

Panel 3: Environment – The Environment is also central to how Africa is invoked.  Africa is often used as a symbol of wildness on the one hand and underdevelopment on the other, and there is considerable scholarship of the intersections nature and development there (Walley 2004) that has much to offer STS more broadly. There has already been productive cross-talk between the spheres of Biomedicine and Environment.  This is partly because of the way that, for colonial science, understanding the natural world in Africa was intertwined with other imperial projects including extracting natural resources of potential benefit to health (Tilley 2011).  In the disparate spheres of bioprospecting and natural therapies on the one hand (Osseo-Asare 2014, Droney 2016, Foster 2017) and mosquito control on the other (Kelly and Biesel 2011), nature and medicine necessarily come together. We seek submissions that contribute to our understanding of the environment in Africa.
Provisional Workshop Schedule

Monday, August 27, 2018
Welcome, Introductions - Tolu Odumosu, Anne Pollock, all participants - 5pm

  *   Organizers welcome participants, explain logistics
  *   Icebreakers
  *   Each participant presents one slide about themselves and presents it for 90 seconds
Welcome to Australia  -  6pm
Helen Verran is a historian and philosopher of science at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Northern Territories, Australia.  She has expertise on both Africa and indigenous Australia, as exemplified by her books Science and an African Logic and Singing the Land, Signing the Land, and so is well-situated to provide introductory welcoming remarks.  She has expressed enthusiasm about participating, pending scheduling.
Networking Dinner - 6:30pm

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Roundtable on funding - 10am
Funding challenges have been one of the significant barriers to doing STS work on and in Africa.  This Roundtable invites representatives from key funding agencies to help Workshop participants understand mechanisms by which this work might be supported.  So far, we have spoken with Wenda Bauchspies from the National Science Foundation, who has expressed her interest.  We are reaching out to representatives from such funders as the European Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust.
Roundtable on publishing - 11:30am
Publishing venues are also important for increasing the profile and visibility of STS work on and in Africa.  This Roundtable invites representatives from key publishing venues to help Workshop Participants understand how to navigate these publishing venues.
Interested in participating in principle:

  *   Sergio Sismondo, Editor of Social Studies of Science
  *   Katie Helke, MIT Press
  *   Khadija Coxon, McGill-Queens University Press

1pm - lunch with Program Officers/Publishers/Workshop attendees

Keynote Panel on Challenges and Promise of STS Work in Africa - 3pm
Confirmed panelists:

  *   Clapperton Mavhunga is an Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research explores knowledge production and innovation in Africa. He is the author of Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2014). He is a major thought leader in this space, for example as editor of the collection, published by MIT Press in 2017, What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?
  *   Tunde Opeibi is a Commonwealth Fellow and a Alexander von Humboldt Fellow who currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Lagos Nigeria. His research is on new media and governance. He is the author of Discourse Strategies in Political Campaigns in Nigeria (Lambert 2011 ). He is leading the embrace of Information Technology in the Nigerian Humanities and Social Science Academy and recently organized the 2017 Lagos Summer School in Digital Humanities.
  *   Natasha Vally is a Next Generation Scholar Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. She is an emerging leader in this space, both in her own research on the technopolitics of post-apartheid South Africa and as part of the organizing team of the first STS-Africa conference, held at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2014.
Panelists interested in participating in principle, pending scheduling:

  *   Abena Osseo-Asare is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the award-winning Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which is a study of six plants which scientists in Ghana, South Africa, Madagascar and other countries sought to transform into new pharmaceuticals.

5:30 - Drinks

6pm - Collaborative Conversations Dinner

Submissions in response to CFP - Held during 4S on Wednesday from 11am
Because part of our goal is to find people working in this space who we do not already know, it is important to circulate a call for papers. We plan to organize submissions in response to the CFP into three panels, organized into a single stream so that all participants hear them, with the with the topical foci of (1) biomedicine (2) information technology (3) environment.
Panel on Biomedicine ~11am
Panel on Information Technology ~2pm
Panel on Environment ~4pm

Optional Post-4S meal for potential 4S-Africa organizers
Saturday, Sept 1, 2018
Having experienced 4S-Sydney, those interested in organizing potential future events, potentially included a 4S in Africa for 2022, will meet over dinner to discuss possibilities.

Updates will be posted here: http://stsafrica2018.com/
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