Abstract: " In Oxford Street, Accra , Ato Quayson analyzes the dynamics of Ghana's capital city through a focus on Oxford Street, part of Accra's most vibrant and globalized commercial district. He traces the city's evolution from its settlement in the mid-...Read more
Tousignant asks: “If toxicology everywhere is unprotective, then what, if anything, is distinctive about toxicology in Senegal?” [She asks this to move away from the have/have not...Read more
AO: It is interesting to note Tichenor avoids the "global North / global South" binary although her work tackles the stark inequalities of power and capital in global health regimes. She instead focuses on how the "global scale" of WHO standards and protocols are adopted by and affect Senegalese national government and local health workers (and how local health workers approximate and perform data to meet global standards (and funding requirements). She identifies organizations explicitly (e.g. Gates Foundation) and does not use the terms global North or South.
AO: Mavhunga aligns his work with Hecht's, noting that you could replace her notion of "nuclearity" with the word "technology" and that would fit his argument (that technology is understood differently by different people in different times, etc.). However, it is interesting to note the difference in their approach to data and archiving, perhaps as a result of their affective and kinship ties to their fieldsites? Clapperton, as noted in his references section conceptualized and developed two archives that he helps to provide oversight on that are managed by community members. Hecht was sharply criticized for not having helped to digitize and create an archive of the unpublished mining materials she used for her own book.
AO: This is the response by Hecht to van Sittert's initial critique of her work. There are a great number of interesting dimensions...Read more
AO: Many of the scholars, either those a bit more on the "periphery" (i.e. based at African universities or not tenured professors on a traditional academic track) or those who have a greater online presence that they appear to have intentionally cultivated (e.g. Jenna Burrell, Kris Peterson?), have their papers available via Academia.edu or ResearchGate. This has been annoying for me because I recently deleted both of my accounts (on principle, see my blog post about this) so it made it very hard for me to download the papers. I eventually had to resign up in order to download a paper by Javita Holbrook that I could not access otherwise elsewhere. Two interesting things I noted during my processes of identifying papers and attempting to centralize them into PECE. 1) An African scholar who is the self-described leader in Digital Humanities in Nigeria has most if not all papers on Researchgate. 2) I noted that one of Javita Holbrook's works (albeit an abstract and not full paper) was listed in Researchgate but linked to the UC e-scholarship infrastructure (which is a public infrastructure for open access works within the UC system). Opening that artifact then suggested to me that I might be interested in Aimé Segla (another person in the STS in Africa exhibit)'s paper and gave me full open access to it. Brilliant!
AO: In this 2018 paper by Alev Coban, she finds that despite the seemingly radical potential of technology "making" in the global South to shift global asymmetries of power, postcolonial power asymmetries persist in relations between Western investors and start-ups/makers, structured by a tech-...Read more
Contrasting Geissler and Tousignant's approach to "capacity" to Bezuidenhout's (and her use of the widely popular capabilities approach by Sen) is very interesting and deserves further analysis.
AO: This 2016 article by Geissler and Tousignant look at the neglect of investing in the capacity of African state-run public health systems as a whole in spite of growing rise of collaborative research in global health in Africa and "capacity building" of individual researchers and groups.Read more
AO: Bezuidenhout look at capacity in material and techno terms not to discuss education or training but rather to look at uneven access to data online. Use Sen's capabilities approach.
AO: Mavhunga, building on Simone's concept of "people as infrastructure" highlights how particular people in Zimbabwe were key nodes in information sharing infrastructure. This is a different take or way of thinking about "capacity" from Tousignant and Okeke who are looking at capacity as inclusive of the equipment, fundings, capabilites. Mavhunga is also looking at capacities, paying attention to the capacities people already have that enable them to import and deploy innovations.
Mavhunga notes the social network of people who were key nodes of information sharing (e.g. Javuendava pg 155 and MaTshangana’s network page 180). He also notes some people as being
AO: This 2016 article by Iruka Okeke argues that few African scientists participate in genomics, and when they do, they are largely providing biological samples. Therefore as new next generation diagnostics, surveillance tools, drugs and vaccines contribute to the growing field of genomic...Read more
AO: This is a fascinating exchange between an associate professor at the University of Cape Town and Gabrielle Hecht and faculty peers at the University of Michigan. Hecht et al. appear quite taken aback by the polemic critique of van Sittert. I am most interested in the points of debate...Read more