Cite as:
Okune, Angela. 2018. "Stacey Langwick." In STS in "Africa" Personal Careers. In STS in "Africa" in Formation, created by Angela Okune and Aadita Chaudhury. In STS Across Borders Digital Exhibit, curated by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August.
Stacey Langwick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. She studies healing and medicine in Africa and teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on medicine, the body, postcolonial science, global health and Africa.
She is also the lead faculty member for the Qualities of Life working group in the Mario Einaudi International Studies Center and a co-organizer of the Ecological Learning Collaboratory.
This PECE essay helps to answer the STS Across Borders analytic question: “What people, projects, and products exemplify how this STS formation has developed over time?”
This essay highlights prominant and upcoming individuals working on critical science and technology issues in Africa and is part of a broader exhibit on "STS in Africa."
STS Across Borders is a special exhibit organized by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) to showcase how the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has developed in different times, places...Read more
Abstract: "This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how...Read more
“A Politics of Habitability” accounts for the rise of a new form of therapy in Tanzania, referred to by some as dawa lishe, or nutritious medicines. This emergent field of practice attends both to discrete bodies and to the relations between people and plants that have enabled modern economies and framed health. Dawa lishe reorganizes relations between agriculture and medicine in order to articulate the threats to well-being that structure the contemporary moment and to experiment with responses to such threats. Through it, Tanzanians are exploring the forms of vitality and growth that are possible today: who and what can grow more amply and more productively, and how? In the process of addressing that which is required to thrive, dawa lishe insists on situating health in a politics of habitability. This move requires reconfiguring notions of medicine, property, chronicity, and crisis that are fundamental to global health."
Source: https://www.acls.org/research/fellow.aspx?cid=a3bc3968-1eed-e411-9417-000c29879dd6
Abstract: “In Tanzania, the encounter between a traditional malady called degedege and the modern malady malaria is a fight to participate in the making of the bodies of women and children as well as the agents that afflict them. In their respective settings,...Read more
Stacey Langwick presents on "A Politics of Habitability: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World" at the Institute for Comparative Modernities, Cornell University in April 2017. Watch here.
Stacey Langwick presented at Cornell University on “(Un)ethical Substances: Albinism, Violence, & the Nature of Skin in Africa" in 2017. Watch here.
Stacey Langwick presented “Partial Publics: The Political Promise of Contemporary Traditional Medicine in Africa" at the Harvard African Studies in March 2015. Watch here.
AO: This 2015 article in NPR's Goats and Soda series includes quotes by Stacey Langwick and exemplifies how the work of STS scholars' travels beyond the university. Langwick notes: "The term [witch doctor] is a broad, misleading — and somewhat condescending — way to refer to traditional...Read more