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Through five ethnographic stories, this article rethinks science from the African home and homestead. Focused on our interlocutors' efforts to heal and protect themselves and their families, these stories of experimentation challenge the ways science is often understood in science studies. Drawing on the literature on science and technology studies (STS) in Africa, postcolonial and feminist STS, medical pluralism, and ontological approaches to health, we argue that rooting our analysis in the worlds of our interlocutors and the practices through which they heal forces a rethinking of what we mean by science. In its place, we offer a science that attends to ontological multiplicity and exceeds and expands on more traditional definitions of science, which for Africa have been aligned with the field experiment and the laboratory. We conclude with the stakes of this intervention, arguing that a more unsettled science studies will decenter the Global North, universalisms, and whiteness, reshaping how we understand science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2016 witnessed the birth of the first baby conceived using mitochondrial replacement technology (MRT), a procedure conducted by an international team in a Mexican clinic. The story soon made it to the international press, where authorship was assigned to the USA team and Mexico was described as lacking regulation, thus a suitable location. The Mexican media offered a different version. The baby was stamped as "made in Mexico" and the Mexican physician involved was described as a remarkable citizen and bold scientist. The story served as a counter-narrative to the one circulating in the press and academic circles. It dismantled the notion of Mexico as a country with "no rules" and instead offered a story of a country producing cutting-edge technology and of a government ready to back up scientific progress. In this paper, we analyze the performative acts that transformed this breakthrough into a national success and we ask about the role the Mexican team had in this accomplishment. This analysis contributes to the conversation held within the field of postcolonial science and technology studies, regarding knowledge production, authorship, and the role of science stories in the process of nation building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT2016 witnessed the birth of the first baby conceived using mitochondrial replacement technology (MRT), a procedure conducted by an international team in a Mexican clinic. The story soon made it to the international press, where authorship was assigned to the USA team and Mexico was described as lacking regulation, thus a suitable location. The Mexican media offered a different version. The baby was stamped as “made in Mexico” and the Mexican physician involved was described as a remarkable citizen and bold scientist. The story served as a counter-narrative to the one circulating in the press and academic circles. It dismantled the notion of Mexico as a country with “no rules” and instead offered a story of a country producing cutting-edge technology and of a government ready to back up scientific progress. In this paper, we analyze the performative acts that transformed this breakthrough into a national success and we ask about the role the Mexican team had in this accomplishment. This analysis contributes to the conversation held within the field of postcolonial science and technology studies, regarding knowledge production, authorship, and the role of science stories in the process of nation building.

Abstract Background While critique on Global Health is not new, recent years show a surge of criticism on the field’s colonial legacy and practices specifically. Such accounts argue that despite Global Health’s strive for universality and equity in health, its activities regularly produce the opposite. The epistemic privileging of Northern academics and scientific method, further augmented by how Global Health funding is arranged, paints a picture of a fragmented field in which ‘doing good’ has become a normatively laden and controversial term. It is specifically this controversy that we seek to unpack in this paper: what does it take to be a ‘good’ Global Health scholar? Results We used Helen Verran’s notion of ‘disconcertment’ to analyse three auto-ethnographic vignettes of Robert’s Global Health ‘fieldwork’. We illustrate that disconcertment, a bodily and personalised experience of unease and conflicting feelings, may serve as an important diagnostic of conflicting imperatives in Global Health. Robert’s fieldwork was entangled with incongruous imperatives which he constantly had to navigate through and that repeatedly produced disconcertment. The contribution that we seek to make here is that such disconcertment is not something to defuse or ignore, but to take seriously and stay with instead. Conclusion Staying with the disconcertment serves as a starting point for conversations about ‘doing good’ in Global Health fieldwork and creates opportunity for making Global Health teaching and projects more reflexive. The paper thereby positions itself in discussions about fair collaborations between the Global North and South and our analysis offers a set of considerations that can be used by Northern scholars to critically reflect on their own role within Global Health.

Background: While critique on Global Health is not new, recent years show a surge of criticism on the field's colonial legacy and practices specifically. Such accounts argue that despite Global Health's strive for universality and equity in health, its activities regularly produce the opposite. The epistemic privileging of Northern academics and scientific method, further augmented by how Global Health funding is arranged, paints a picture of a fragmented field in which 'doing good' has become a normatively laden and controversial term. It is specifically this controversy that we seek to unpack in this paper: what does it take to be a 'good' Global Health scholar? Results: We used Helen Verran's notion of 'disconcertment' to analyse three auto-ethnographic vignettes of Robert's Global Health 'fieldwork'. We illustrate that disconcertment, a bodily and personalised experience of unease and conflicting feelings, may serve as an important diagnostic of conflicting imperatives in Global Health. Robert's fieldwork was entangled with incongruous imperatives which he constantly had to navigate through and that repeatedly produced disconcertment. The contribution that we seek to make here is that such disconcertment is not something to defuse or ignore, but to take seriously and stay with instead. Conclusion: Staying with the disconcertment serves as a starting point for conversations about 'doing good' in Global Health fieldwork and creates opportunity for making Global Health teaching and projects more reflexive. The paper thereby positions itself in discussions about fair collaborations between the Global North and South and our analysis offers a set of considerations that can be used by Northern scholars to critically reflect on their own role within Global Health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author proposes that for STS as a discipline to change and progress, and to generate opportunities when entering into a dialog with postcolonial and feminist studies and activism, as well opening itself to decolonial options, it must first conduct itself in acts of provincialization. To do so, a methodological challenge is proposed: Taking infrastructure seriously by understanding infrastructure as founded in and by cultural and knowledge labor. Taking inspiration from Chandra Mukerji and others, this methodological re-imagining is proposed in the form of cultural infrastructural genealogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the global university sector continues to expand, ever more academic work is being published, including growing numbers of academic monographs. Digital technologies open up opportunities for publishers to reach new academic communities. Drawing on interviews with authors and publishers, case-studies of two companies - Lambert Academic Publishing (Lambert) and Cambridge Scholars Publishing (CSP) - interrogate their inclusive, author-centred visions. Conceptualisations of academic 'credibility economies' strain to account for the different rationales academics have for publishing their work across a fragmented and multipolar global research system. Work has tended to focus on researchers' strategies for accumulating and managing credibility, rather than the structural blockages to, and the geographical constraints on, the flow of academic credibility. For researchers working at the margins of existing credibility economies, publishing an academic monograph is also about gaining global visibility and recognition. Promising to democratise publishing, the two publishers have both been accused of 'predatory' business practices. In response, CSP has sought to accumulate scholarly credibility, whilst Lambert rejects what it calls 'traditional' approaches to evaluating reputation and legitimacy. The two case-studies support a postcolonial critique of the 'predatory publishing' discourse, highlighting the exclusions and effacements enacted by the global academic publishing ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where There Is No Doctor is one of the most widely used community health books in the world and has been translated into over 80 languages. This paper traces four aspects of translation in Tamil-language editions of the text, including Doctor Illaadha Idaththil and related books. First, translators choose and create language to produce a colloquial text related to, but different from, the original. Second, the translated text, as part of a genre of health writing, is edited to motivate readers to take new and different actions related to their bodies and wellbeing. Third, the success of this work is assessed by asking future readers to respond to the draft. Finally, the finished translation circulates to new arenas, influencing popular writing on health and ways of understanding the body. Analyzing the translation of a health text through the lens of postcolonial translation studies, this paper argues that the translation and adaptation of Where There Is No Doctor and the books it inspired engage translators, clinicians, and future readers in a transnational knowledge production process.

With this short essay, we aim to raise awareness of the NTU Institute of Science and Technology for Humanity (NISTH) initiative and to invite our colleagues to partake in the research programs we hope to see initiated at NISTH in years to come. In particular, building on the launch of the Institute, supplemented by the extraordinary global experience of COVID-19, we suggest ways in which STS scholars from around the world might contribute to the public conversation regarding the 4IR and thereby also to the ways in which the relationships between technology, states, and citizens might be imagined with specific reference to Asia's future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to reflect on the role of Science, Technology and Society (STS) research(ers) in co-constructing Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in the Global South. By reporting on RRI research in the Global South, here the Indo-Dutch NWO-MVI project on rice straw burning in Punjab, we make an argument for approaching RRI as a symmetric process of knowledge production mobilised by local actors and researchers alike. For STS researchers to responsibly engage with local innovation systems, their activities need to go beyond knowledge provision and towards facilitating the ownership and circulation of local meanings and means to responsibly innovate. Rather than understanding RRI as a fixed framework to govern innovation practices, this article reflects on RRI as an approach that combines research with intervention. We propose that following the principle of symmetry can turn RRI into a productive tool for the mobilisation of embedded local principles that can organise innovation systems in a responsible way. In particular, symmetry allows the re-location of meanings and practices of innovation as well as the re-negotiation of multiple notions of responsible governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helen Verran uses the term ‘relational empiricism’ to describe situated empirical inquiry that is attentive to the relations that constitute its objects of study, including the investigator’s own practices. Relational empiricism draws on and reconfigures Science and Technology Studies’ traditional concerns with reflexivity and relationality, casting empirical inquiry as an important and non-innocent world-making practice. Through a reading of Verran’s postcolonial projects in Nigeria and Australia, this article develops a concept of empirical and political ‘accountability’ to complement her relational empiricism. In Science and an African Logic, Verran provides accounts of the relations that materialize her empirical objects. These accounts work to decompose her original objects, generating new objects that are more promising for the specific postcolonial contexts of her work. The process of decomposition is part of remaining accountable for her research methods and accountable to the worlds she is working in and writing about. This is a practice of narrating relations and learning to tell better technoscientific stories. What counts as better, however, is not given, but is always contextual and at stake. In this way, Verran acts not as participant-observer, but as participant-storyteller, telling stories to facilitate epistemic flourishing within and as part of a historically located community of practice. The understanding of accountability that emerges from this discussion is designed as a contribution, both practical and evocative, to the theoretical toolkit of Science and Technology Studies scholars who are interested in thinking concretely about how we can be more accountable to the worlds we study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we engage with the widespread and influential approach of National Innovation Systems (NIS). We discuss its adequacy to non-OECD countries, especially in Latin America where it tends to be reified. Although the NIS approach is meant to address the most pressing needs of the economies it applies to, we argue that it would benefit from developing a more encompassing scope, allowing integration of greater diversity and complexity. By retracing the history of regimes of science, technology and innovation in Latin America, we explore the following paradox: whereas numerous Southern scholars urge the pressing need to develop an innovation agenda for Southern countries with a 'Southern framework of thought', they continue to heavily rely on a reductionist version of the NIS-approach that prevents such a 'Southern perspective' to fully emerge. This creates problems for actors willing to use NIS more reflexively, and it also affects the effectivity of science, technology and innovation (STI) policies in non-OECD countries. We formulate a research agenda with three suggestions for further engaging NIS both conceptually and practically. Using such analytical perspectives, we argue, might benefit both to scholarly work about NIS, but could also allow for a better articulation with STI regimes in Southern countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]