[STS-Africa] VAD 2022 conference cfp open

[Siri Lamoureaux]

Hello!

Please consider submitting to the Panel Afr01 - deadline Jan 31.


https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/vad2022/p/11041



Re-wiring Africa: How do quests for scientific progress and for  
decoloniality resonate with each other?.


Accounting for how Africa is being wired into global modernizing  
projects and the language of scientific universals, this panel asks  
how postcolonial critique might change with technoscientific practice  
and how inversely calls for scientific progress could resonate with  
decolonial imaginaries.

Long Abstract

Accounting for how Africa is being wired into global modernizing  
projects and the language of scientific universals, this panel asks  
how postcolonial critique might change when getting close to  
technoscientific practice and how inversely ongoing calls for  
scientific progress could possibly resonate with decolonial  
imaginaries. African Studies (a social sciences and humanities driven  
field) and the work of natural scientists (and technology and  
engineering projects) taking place in Africa appear to be driven by  
very different orientations. While decolonial thought, and the quest  
for Africa’s own voice in the world saturates African Studies,  
practitioners of science and technology must rather sustain networks  
and (quite literally) connective wires in their work with the leading  
centers of knowledge production. This points to another axis: social  
sciences and humanities privilege difference, semantic negotiations,  
and solitary publications, while natural scientists adopt common  
universal languages and meta codes for collaborations. Material,  
electronic, digital, and political infrastructures (or the lack  
thereof) undergird both orientations: telecommunications  
infrastructure, open data commitments, deep sea cables and radio  
towers bringing internet to Africa’s interior, decisions to allow  
funding to flow into national research and training institutions.  
Technologically integrated into a global science logic, hardwired  
Africa challenges the social sciences to revisit questions of place  
and universality, participation and historically induced knowledge  
structures. We ask how the “postcolonial” might change when  
approaching scientific practice, how calls for scientific progress  
resonate with decolonial imaginaries in Africa. In this panel, we  
invite contributions that present cases in which these struggles are  
made explicit.


-- 
Dr. Siri Lamoureaux

Sociology Department
University of Siegen
Adolf-Reichwein-Str. 2
57068 Siegen, Germany
siri.lamoureaux at uni-siegen.de
+49 (0)271 740-4511
https://www.uni-siegen.de/phil/sozialwissenschaften/soziologie/mitarbeiter/lamoureaux_siri/
https://lost-research-group.org/staff/siri-lamoureaux/