Tousignant, Noemi (Author)
Focusing on the Laboratory of Toxicology and Analytical Chemistry of the Faculty of Pharmacy at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal, this article foregrounds temporality as a key dimension of the postcolonial history of African science. This laboratory, like many others across Africa, is experienced by its current and former members as a space of shortage. I explore how memories of ‘means’ and past scientific activity in Dakar and abroad give meaning to subsequent experiences of the lab as a place filled with inactive ‘antiques’ and ‘wreckage’. I suggest that the waning of means not only displaces scientific activity ‘elsewhere’ but also fragments its tempos, altering its rhythms along with its social, moral and affective qualities. The interpenetration of past and future generates nostalgia, segmented narratives and trajectories, quests for immediacy and continuity, as well as new engagements with routines of scientific regulation and management. Paying attention to the intersection of materiality and temporality – by taking seriously African scientists’ longing for science that moves forward, keeps pace, begins now and fills up time – thus opens up new ways of understanding what science means and what it means to do science in times of promise and decline, emergence and interruption, hope and uncertainty in postcolonial Africa.
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Book
Noémi Tousignant;
(2018)
Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal
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Julia Melkers;
Eric Welch;
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Differential Social Network Effects on Scholarly Productivity: An Intersectional Analysis
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(2015)
Research Is Our Resource: Surviving Experiments and Politics at an African Cancer Institute, 1950 to the Present
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Toxic remains: Infrastructural failure in a Ugandan molecular biology lab
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Jameson Wetmore;
G Pascal Zachary;
Ravtosh Bal;
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Radin, Joanna;
Reardon, Jenny;
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Indigenous Body Parts, Mutating Temporalities, and the Half-Lives of Postcolonial Technoscience
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Bottleneck: moving, building, and belonging in an African city
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Kusiak, Pauline;
(2010)
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Homburg, Ernst;
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Speuren op de tast: Een historische kijk op industriële en universitaire research; (Tracking by touch: An historical perspective on industrial and university research)
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Fullwiley, Duana;
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The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa
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Ewout Frankema;
Marlous van Waijenburg;
(2023)
What about the race between education and technology in the Global South? Comparing skill premiums in colonial Africa and Asia
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Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945-1960
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Joshua Grace;
(2021)
African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development
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Anna-Leena Toivanen;
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Aeromobilities of Student Newcomers in Francophone African Fiction
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Ann H. Kelly;
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Field station as stage: Re-enacting scientific work and life in Amani, Tanzania
Book
John Whysner;
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Chen, Ruey-Lin;
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Law, John;
Lin, Wen-yuan;
(June 2017)
Postcoloniality, Symmetry, and Method
Essay Review
Filip Vostal;
(2019)
Acceleration Approximating Science and Technology Studies: On Judy Wajcman’s Recent Oeuvre
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