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Paper short abstract

We analyse efforts to “make” crop genome editing African as the formation of a new scientific field. Drawing on Gieryn’s boundary work and interviews in Ghana and Kenya, we show how the field of African crop genome editing is discursively and institutionally constructed and contested.

Paper long abstract

How do new scientific fields take shape when actors seek to make them “local”? We examine efforts to make crop genome editing African as a process of field formation within crop biotechnology. The development of genome editing in and for Africa is often framed as technological diffusion—the uptake of a neutral, pre-formed tool. We show instead that African actors actively redefine what crop genome editing is and what it should become for Africa through discursive and institutional practices.

Our analysis draws on 26 semi-structured interviews with molecular plant scientists and breeders involved in crop genome editing in Ghana and Kenya. As genome editing becomes institutionally established, Ghanaian and Kenyan researchers are not simply adding a new technique to an existing field. They negotiate which crops, infrastructures, training pathways, funding arrangements, and problem framings should constitute legitimate crop biotechnology in their contexts. In doing so, they reshape the boundaries, priorities, and authority structures of the field itself.

Analytically, we mobilise Thomas Gieryn’s concept of boundary work as a productive lens for studying field formation. Boundary work foregrounds the discursive and institutional labour through which actors demarcate domains, attribute legitimacy, and stabilise authority. By shifting attention from technological diffusion to field reconfiguration, the paper offers an empirically grounded account of how crop biotechnology is rearticulated in practice, and how struggles over localness shape the institutional and epistemic trajectory of an emerging scientific field.