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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
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