[STS-Africa] Trans-Speciated Thinking: Rat Training as Epistemological Practice in Tanzania

[Laura Meek]

*apologies for cross-posting*



Dear colleagues,



All are welcome at this upcoming event organized by the Centre for the
Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. Details below and
poster attached.



*****



*HKU Science, Technology, and Medicine Seminar Series*



*Trans-Speciated Thinking: Rat Training as Epistemological Practice in
Tanzania*



Wednesday, March 30 @ 9pm Hong Kong



Other Time Zones:



9am EST (New York) / 2pm GMT (London) / 3pm SAST (Cape Town) / 4pm EAT (Dar
es Salaam)



Delivery: via Zoom

Registration Weblink: https://bit.ly/3ux08No

Please register and the Zoom link will be sent to you prior to the event.



Speaker: *Jia Hui Lee, PhD *(Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow and Visiting
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Haverford College)



Discussant: *Susan Levine, PhD *(Professor and Head of Anthropology,
University of Cape Town)



Moderator: *Laura Meek, PhD* (Assistant Professor, Centre for the
Humanities and Medicine, HKU)







*Abstract:*

This talk positions rodent trainers in Tanzania as philosophers of the mind
who explore, propose, and critique the experiences of being human through
their speculation of rodent minds. Rodent trainers in Tanzania speculate
about rodent minds as a way to understand how best to train them to detect
landmines as part of an international humanitarian project. I draw on these
trainers’ experiences of working with rats to analyze how they participate
in a long, cross-disciplinary history of thinking about cognition that
depend on careful observations of rodent behaviors. In speculating about
rodent learning and cunning, rodent trainers subsequently reflect on the
importance of “hekima,” an intelligent ability to understand and
participate in social relations that foster solidarity and social wellbeing
in Tanzanian society. I further situate this “working theory of mind”
within the social inequalities that Tanzanian trainers confront while
working for an international NGO. This work forms part of a larger research
project that builds on ongoing critiques in Black studies, anthropology,
and science and technology studies about “post/humanism,” and suggests that
scholars begin to look to Africa for “counterhumanisms.”





*Speaker Bio:*

*Jia Hui Lee *is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow and a Visiting Assistant
Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College. His research project,
*Interstitial
Intelligence: Human-Rodent Sensing, Cognition, and Work in Morogoro,
Tanzania*, is an historically informed ethnography of various human-rodent
encounters in zoological research, animal training, and pest management
schemes. He examines how rodent researchers, trappers, and trainers produce
new knowledges, sensory capacities, and technologies, and their
entanglements with colonial legacies, global inequities, and speculations
about the future. More broadly, his research argues that such
more-than-human encounters are crucial sites for generating theories and
critiques that offer a counterhumanist vision of being “human” in
21st-century Africa. Dr. Lee has a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge.





*Discussant Bio:*

*Susan Levine* is Professor and Head of Anthropology at the University of
Cape Town. She is a medical anthropologist whose research focuses on toxic
landscapes, children and childhoods, virological and biomedical science,
and with new work in vaccine hesitancy in South Africa. Dr. Levine leads a
new MA program called Health Humanities and the Arts, which brings artists,
medical workers, and social scientists into conversation.



Laura A. Meek, PhD (she/her)
Assistant Professor
Centre for the Humanities and Medicine
The University of Hong Kong
e: lameek at hku.hk  |  t: (852) 3917 7937

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

2021. Azizi: Gender, Relationality, and the Embodiment of *Mawazo *in
Tanzania <https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12368>. *Anthropology and Humanism*.
(Early View.)

2021. The Grammar of Leprosy: Temporal Politics and the Impossible Subject
<http://www.medanthrotheory.org/article/view/5525>. *Medicine Anthropology
Theory*. (Open Access.) Recipient of the MAE–MAT Early Career Paper Award.

2021. Knowing Better? Epistemological Bounds in MAQ from 1975-2021
<https://medanthroquarterly.org/teaching/rta/issue-3-knowing-better-epistemological-bounds-in-maq-from-1975-2021/>.
*Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Reading the Archive*. (Open Access.)

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