Short Abstract

This panel examines archives, museums, datasets and digital outputs as “knowledge prisms” through which scientific knowledge of and in Africa is shaped and circulated. It explores the tensions and possibilities of preservation, access and repair and how knowledge is transformed over time.

Long Abstract

How is scientific knowledge produced, stored and circulated in Africa, and how are ideas configured, changed, and corrupted in the archives, museums and data systems developed to secure scientific knowledge for future generations? This panel will explore the ways in which knowledge of scientific practices in Africa is and has been shaped through the ideas, systems and structures that document, classify and preserve information.

Taking “knowledge prisms” as a framework, we consider archives, datasets, photographs, medical collections, museum objects, surveys and digital outputs as distinct forms of information that produce particular ways of knowing, representing, maintaining, translating and reproducing science. Attending to these materials—to their histories, contemporary condition, uses, afterlives and potential—provides a prism through which to view the past, present and future of African science. This panel asks how refracting scientific knowledge in this way might offer alternative ways of seeing, knowing and understanding science across Africa. Recognising that these forms of knowledge are rarely complete, comparable, accessible, or stable, especially in settings often defined by material shortage and deterioration (Stoler, 2009; Arondekar 2009), the panel also considers how we might think with repair, refusal and care to reshape how we engage and write with historic materials and records (Caswell and Cifor, 2021; Campt, 2019).

The panel aims to convene papers that are cut across disciplines including history, anthropology, science and technologies studies, African studies, global health and geography. It will encourage submissions that centre on engagements and collaborations with artists, archival institutions and community-based practitioners.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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