AO: Crane is thinking about ethics in Africa less in terms of questions of benefit and harm and more on questions of participation in international science. (845) She notes that “debates over research practice and the conditions under which such practices are deemed ethically legitimate or questionable reflect the challenges faced by African researchers seeking to participate in global health science.” (845) She notes that there is a tension (experienced by the African scientists) between articulating that there are unique circumstances/contexts in Africa vs asserting that African should be considered differently from global / universal standards. MACRO: (How) are economic and legal infrastructures said to shape science and technology in Africa?
AO: She notes how transnational scientific partnerships and agreements produce new relationships, groups, languages, and technologies even as they reproduce colonial power dynamics, now refigured within the postcolonial dyad of ‘donor’ nations and ‘developing’ nations (846).
AO: funding bodies are noted as key in determining whose science travels (852). Crane notes:
“as long as the locus of power in terms of access to funding and journal publication lies primarily in North America and Europe, creating different regulations for Africa would likely be detrimental to the careers of Ugandan researchers aspiring for international recognition, as changing the regulations would impede the acceptability of data from Uganda into the international scientific arena by rendering it both scientifically and ethically suspect. In this way, the regulatory apparatus of (usually Northern) funding bodies plays a key role in governing who is and who is not able to participate in the making of global health science. Here we see that the question at stake is not only how science travels but whose science travels, and whose does not.” (852)
