Making Scientific Capacity in Africa: An Interdisciplinary Conversation
@CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 13 June 2014 - 14 June
2014
Convened by Ruth J. Prince, Noémi Tousignant, Branwyn
Poleykett, Henrietta Moore and P. Wenzel Geissler
The organisers invite abstracts of 500 words and an
author biography (incl. institutional affiliation) of 150 words. Those and any
inquiries should be submitted via email to capacityinafrica@gmail.com by 31
March 2014.
Large-scale initiatives by key institutions that support
scientific work in Africa, like Wellcome Trust, Royal Society, DFID, and Gates
and Rockefeller Foundation aim at, or require as an integrated component, the
reinforcement of institutional, academic and individual scientific capacity –
notably in fields like medicine and agriculture.
Capacity is a goal shared by a diversity of African
actors and their collaborators across disciplines. As a pragmatic strategy to
improve wellbeing, an ethical commitment to fair and sustainable
collaborations, or a political project to reverse long histories of spatial
imbalances of power, knowledge and resources, capacity appears as an
unambiguous good. And yet it raises unanswered – indeed, often unasked –
questions about how scientific infrastructure and activity emerge from and act
on social, institutional and material processes as they unfold within specific
locations and histories
These are concrete questions pertaining to how capacity
should be defined, planned for and invested in, as much as they raise
theoretical issues about the imbrications of knowledge and technology with
space, power, lives and materiality. Should funds be invested in universities
or hospitals, people or equipment, training or infrastructure? How are entities
such as institutions, people and apparatus connected and animated – by skill
but also motivation, imagination and aspiration – as capacity to create and
mobilize knowledge? What traces have past scientific circulations and
collaborations left; how do current capacity-building initiatives attempt to
build on or break away from these legacies, and what do they achieve? How and
to what extent can scientific capacity transform African futures?
This two-day workshop will elicit and discuss questions
such as these by bringing together leading actors of major capacity-building
programmes with social scholars of science, technology and medicine in Africa.
This conversation between the sciences, social sciences and humanities should
allow a critical examination of capacity, but also invites the elaboration of
new ways of sharing concerns, knowledge and analytical tools across
disciplinary and institutional groups
Contributions from the natural and health sciences as
well as from the social sciences and humanities are welcome, particularly
addressing the questions below:
1. What is capacity; does it reside in minds, objects,
networks; how is it tied to geographical place; how does it move and get moved;
for what practical and moral ends; towards which un/intended long and
short-term effects; what pasts does it remember and what futures does it
anticipate?
2. What can we learn from past experiences of capacity
building and transfer, from the mid-20th century to the present? What did these
initiatives leave behind in people, structures and material remains?
3. How can the
topic of capacity as a joint endeavour promote new forms of exchange between
science, social science and the humanities, enabling the collaborative shaping
of capacity-building programmes from planning through to evaluation?
Confirmed speakers include:
Professor David Dunne, Pathology, Cambridge Professor
Julie Livingston, Rutgers University Professor Wapu Mulwafu, Dean of the College
of Social Science, University of Malawi
Professor Iruka Okeke, Haverford College Professor Sharon
Peacock, Medicine, Cambridge Professor Peter Redfield, University of North
Carolina Professor Claire Wendland, University of Wisconsin Professor James
Wood, Veterinary Science, Cambridge Professor Nelson Sewankambo, Makerere
School of Health Sciences, Uganda