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****************************************************** * http://www.anthropologymatters.com * * A postgraduate project comprising online journal, * * online discussions, teaching and research resources * * and international contacts directory. * ****************************************************** Dear colleagues, We are organizing a panel on "Biomedicine, Governance and Experimentation" during the European Conference on African Studies. The conference will take place from 4 to 7 June, 2009, in Leipzig (Germany). You will find below and enclosed the call for papers for this panel (constituted of three sub-panels). Do not hesitate as well to circulate it to your colleagues who can be interested. Paper proposals should not be longer than 400 words and have to be submitted through the ECAS website before the 31rst of December, 2008. You will find also on the website some practical information: http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~ecas2009/ Best regards, Babette Müller-Rockstroh and Virginie Tallio Call for Papers On Biomedicine, Governance and Experimentation The Max Planck Fellow Group LOST (Law, Organization, Science and Technology) organizes a panel during the 3rd Conference on African Studies on “Biomedicine, Governance and Experimentation”. The conference will take place from the 4th to the 7th of June, 2009 in Leipzig (Germany). Contact: Babette Müller-Rockstroh ([log in to unmask]) Virginie Tallio ([log in to unmask]) In Africa, biomedical research and health services have been conducted jointly over the past century, shaping landscapes of healing and scientific experimentation. This conduct leads to the emergence of interstitial spaces where regimes of governance, techno-scientific practices and social reproduction are undergoing significant changes. We invite papers that explore these shifting constellations and the emergence of new relationships between bodies, politics and science. Panel 1 - Biomedicine and governance: theorizing the relations between science and administration Chair: Babette Mueller-Rockstroh Discussant: Wenzel Geissler The African health crisis and the hollowing out of state capacity have expanded the scope of intervention. In many countries medical care has virtually collapsed as a result of failing structures, devastating pandemics, conflict and war. As a result, the continent is increasingly viewed through biomedical lenses and becomes re-shaped accordingly. In these circumstances various international, state, and non-state actors are called upon to provide medical services and do medical research under neoliberal principles of governance. In this workshop we want to focus on biomedical practices, forms of organizing medical care and research, and on corresponding legal regimes that all together aim to enhance well-being by controlling disease. We want to examine how biomedicine constitutes an armamentarium of political technologies that ensures social and spatial order by governing bodies and by making populations accessible to medical intervention. We want to find out how this armamentarium is transformed by its encounters with individual sufferers, afflicted populations, and institutional environments. Panel 2 - Africa as a laboratory: questioning implementation research and humanitarian innovation Chair: Virginie Tallio Discussant: Vinh-Kim Nguyen The media and international organizations predominantly depict Africa as the continent of famine, epidemics and wars. They privilege the view that Africa mainly deals with ongoing humanitarian crises and frame the continent as prototype the states of emergency. This prepares the ground for emergency interventions which require a different legitimation than, for instance, development projects. In an inversion of the classical modernist model of experimentation – where evidence of the efficacy of a technology permits intervention – in these scenarios, the exceptional intervention validates itself as being effective and enables to learn a lesson for the next occasion. Implementation and experimentation thus become blurred. Medical care and research are the most evident fields of this newly emerging form of experimentality, which includes also other forms of socio-political and economic governing and humanitarian innovation. It is also mirrored in the emergence of new actors in the field of humanitarian intervention such as P.P.P.s or private foundations. These issues will be explored in this panel. Panel 3 - Experimental subjectivity: emerging forms of citizenship in African contexts Chair: Wenzel Geissler Discussant: Shalini Randeria (To be confirmed) This panel will explore the intersection of emerging regimes of governance (i.e., classical state formations as well as humanitarian and development programs and nation-building technologies such as truth and reconciliation practices) and techno-scientific practices with subjectivity in African worlds. Rather than seeing Africans as passive “subjects” of government or intervention, this panel will explore how worlds and subjectivities are re-made as political and material technologies are incorporated into ethical projects, forms of self-fashioning, or political projects. The goals of the panel are (1) to highlight the ways in which political and material technologies are translated—i.e. appropriated, sublimated or resisted, to name a few—by Africans (2) to explore the unintended consequences, working misunderstandings and otherwise unexpected that results when these technologies are deployed and circulate across African worlds (3) to describe the impact of these phenomena on subjectivities. We take subjectivity to encompass registers of identity, narrative, citizenship, and self-fashioning. -- Virginie Tallio, PhD. Research Fellow Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology PF 11 03 51 D-06017 Halle/Saale Germany Phone + 49 (0)345/2927-586 Fax + 49 (0)345/2927-502 http://www.eth.mpg.de ************************************************************* * Anthropology-Matters Mailing List * * To join this list or to look at the archived previous * * messages visit: * * http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/Anthropology-Matters.HTML * * If you have ALREADY subscribed: to send a message to all * * those currently subscribed to the list,just send mail to: * * [log in to unmask] * * * * Enjoyed the mailing list? Why not join the new * * CONTACTS SECTION @ www.anthropologymatters.com * * an international directory of anthropology researchers * ***************************************************************