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- Convenors:
-
Hanna Nieber
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Siri Lamoureaux (University of Siegen)
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- Discussant:
-
Andrea Behrends
(Leipzig University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- African Studies
- Location:
- Room 1224
- Sessions:
- Thursday 9 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short 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 align 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 align with 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.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 9 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Decolonial debates about wired data infrastructures abound. This paper examines case studies where tensions, negotiations and compromises take place: data science capacity building, storage and transmitting infrastructures, and the accessibility of databases.
Paper long abstract:
Africa is entering the 4IR along with the rest of the world, but how, what and whose terms? ‘Wires’ are understood as hard and soft relations drawing disparate entities into communication. They also reveal Africa’s networked embeddedness in the world. Drawing from an examination of the wiring of data infrastructures, databases, data work and implementation, this paper identifies different relations that emerge from postcolonial turbulence that are drawn between Africa and the promise of Big Data as a way to solve problems, collect information, analyze it and use it. Data assemblages comprise a host of hardwired facilities such as remote sensing systems, data storage, fiberoptic cables, high-powered computers, analytics such as AI/ML/NLP systems as well as “softwires” such as social networking, funding, national interests, private actors, Panafricanist aspirations, development agendas, skills and capacity-building and so on. Decolonial debates about these wired and networked relations abound. This paper examines several case studies where such tensions, negotiations and compromises take place, looking specifically at data science capacity building, storage and transmitting infrastructures, and the accessibility of databases for data analytics purposes.
Paper short abstract:
This study examines successes, challenges, and limitations African Indigenous healthcare experts experience in their attempts to break even with their European counterparts as assessment is done using the conflictual western or European scientific frameworks and knowledge production systems.
Paper long abstract:
The quest for decolonization in knowledge production in Africa extends to scientific investigations and/or inquiries in healthcare management systems, more particularly in the prevention and cure of infectious diseases like Ebola and Coronavirus. The outbreak of the pandemic - Coronavirus Disease in 2019 (COVID-19), which originated from Wuhan China brought about many explorations and attempts by Africans to find solutions and cures using the indigenous knowledge systems and methodology in traditional medical practice. it is obvious that great successes were achieved in containing the spread of the virus in many African nations with the use of seemingly simple and clear traditional solutions and cures; however, the efforts and successes achieved by African traditional medical practitioners seem to be undermined by the failure of international organizations, like WHO and many other scientists and healthcare managers in most developed nations, including Europe to recognize their impact for lack of scientific evidence, which is colored by western philosophies, methods, and practices. This paper critically discusses the successes achieved by many African nations in containing the spread of Covid-19, it highlights the challenges and limitations Indigenous African scientists and healthcare experts experience in their attempts to break even with their European counterparts as they are assessed using the conflictual framework of western or European scientific discoveries and knowledge production systems. Amongst the findings is the close relationship between tales and facts in the histories.
Paper short abstract:
We explore how the scientific imagination behind recent global infrastructures in space science in South Africa and Madagascar is entangled with postcolonial histories and practices that produce and destabilize Africa and Outer space as epistemic objects, generating new tensions and possibilities.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, space science has become a thriving field in Africa. Research programmes and telescopes on African grounds, wired into global infrastructures of knowledge and data, are increasingly contributing to new astronomical insights that cover “new grounds” and extend the “frontiers” of what is already known about our cosmos and our planet’s place within it. With striking parallels to European colonization of Africa, scientific imagination constructs outer space as a new “terra nullius”, the depths of which elicit curiosity and attract funding. Doing space science on African grounds reinscribes colonial and postcolonial histories of “Africa” within the discursive formation of cutting-edge astronomical research about “outer space”. How do these entanglements feed back into postcolonial conceptualizations of “Africa”? How does Earth figure both as planetary whole (as a celestial body amongst many) and as ridden by global inequalities (distributed across the postcolonial world map)? What scalar dynamics does space science mobilize to definitions of Africa and outer space as epistemic objects? What are the locations of a universalized approach to postcoloniality?
In our contribution, based on two case studies from South Africa and Madagascar, we map these questions and further ask how astronomy’s gaze towards the cosmos relates to the particularities of South Africa’s exceptionalism and to Madagascar’s ambivalent relation to the African mainland. Our paper sets out to investigate how the studies of outer space in Africa and African studies on planet Earth meet.