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Short abstract:

By closely examining the scientists' work along with the ants and the biomedical histories they are entangled in, I explore concerns with global health through ecological and multispecies relations to raise questions of difference and persistent racial hierarchies in scientific knowledge production.

Long abstract:

Insect ecologies and multispecies relations, like in Ant-Fungus gardens, have now come to occupy the technoscientific imagination of natural products researchers looking for "entities of biological interests" that may serve salutary purposes for humans. Natural products scientists in Panama deploy microbial and ecological understandings of Ant-Fungus gardens that will enable them to isolate biochemicals to one day offer interventions for diseases and the growing ailments of late industrialism locally and worldwide. In this sociotechnical arrangement, Ant-fungus gardens are nested and entangled with other life forms, modes of being, racial histories, and various biomedical articulations such as tropical medicine, public health, and global health disparities produced by layers of colonial rule, U.S. government involvement in shaping hemispheric political economies, and imaginaries of development and their uneven outcomes. By closely examining the scientists' work "along with the ants" and the biomedical histories they are entangled in, I explore concerns with global health through ecological and multispecies relations to raise questions of difference, particularly persistent racial hierarchies in scientific knowledge production. I underscore how knowledge frameworks carried forward from colonial times continue to influence global health, technoscience, and biomedicine. How do scientists in Panama respond to relationships of power and difference in global health research, primarily those differences defined by and through historical racial formations and the longue durée of technoenvironmental racialization(s)? How can multispecies experiments contribute to understanding technoenvironmental racializations and their impact on emergent eco-political transformations in Latin American contexts?