STS in Africa: Eco

While the eco level of analysis was less frequently used overall by the STS scholars included in the query, several important insights emerged by those who did employ a more material approach to understanding their object of study. For example, Lesley Green found the importance of practice-based ontologies (responding to sedimented categories of indigenous knowledge vs science). She noted that “the ‘natures’ in play are not based on someone’s cultural (or ‘stakeholder’) identity, but on their actual interactions with sea and fish,” an insight she terms “relational ontology” (2012: 6). This concept helps to reveal some of the discursive risks of other scholarly work (most notably, a reliance on stable occupational and identity categories to describe human actors (e.g. Foster 2017). Osseo-Asare similarly notes the instability of categories and construction of boundaries (in her work, the nation-state boundaries) as revealed by how plants and plant knowledge travel around the African continent. She notes: “When environments and ethnic groups overlap, and plants and people move over time, who is to say that Country X somehow owns Plant Y?” (201). Foster (2017) noted that the way that the hoodia plants grew slowly in the ground, spread its seeds widely, evolved in patchy spatial distributions and interacted with the human body all shaped the very relations of law, science and market that tried to contain it. Looking at pre-paid micro-devices, von Schnitzler (2013) noted the intentional breaking and rewiring of technology (for illicit purposes) which she argues led to cycles of innovation (to identify, revise, normalize the rewired technology, leading to more elaborate tactics to rewire, etc.). Von Schnitzler looked expressly at the material technology itself as a site of politics (although her analysis did not necessarily look at how the machines act as agents in their own right as Griffin and Hayler (2018) put forth, but rather on how the humans contend with each other indirectly via their relations to/with the machine).

Tichenor (2017) noted the importance of flooding in thinking about and tackling malaria disease (a ecological factor she highlights is not included in most global health programs designed to reduce malaria). In a similar vein, Bezuidenhout et al. (2017), Crane (2010) and Tousignant (2018) identified the need for facility repairs, equipment maintenance and calibration, severe time pressures including heavy clinical loads and a lack of research support.

With a historical material approach, Mavhunga (2014) notes the arrival of the gun, use of poison, tsetse plague and other diseases as undergirding historical and contemporary science and tech work on the continent. Pollock (2014) cites the history of mining and the physical decaying signs of this industrial past as well the fact that South Africa is in the same time zone as Europe as shaping the development of science and tech in South Africa.