Infrastructures of Exposure: Toxicity, Temporality and Political Economies in Africa

Description

The registration for the Mornings session has been closed.
We still have few places for the Afternoon session, which will be closed on Monday 10 March.

Free workshop, open to all but Registration is required.
To reserve a place  for the AFTERNNOON Session, please email to gradfac@crassh.cam.ac.uk
 

Darwin College (morning session 9.00 am – 12.00)
CRASSH, seminar room SG1 (afternoon session 13.30 – 17.00)

Conveners

Dr Noémi Tousignant  (Anthropologies of Africa Biosciences, University of Cambridge)
Dr Branwyn Poleykett (Research Fellow, Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)

Summary

Toxic exposure, whether acute or chronic, challenges the temporalities of public health monitoring and response. Dissonance between the effects of poisons, whether sudden or cumulative, and the rhythms of toxicological knowledge-making can be accentuated by situations of social inequality. Emerging problems of toxic exposure in Africa highlight relations between socioeconomic vulnerability, representations of marginality and obstacles to durable medical, scientific and regulatory capacity. This workshop brings together scholars who use the concept of ‘infrastructure’ for analyzing inequalities in embodied and techno-scientific perceptions of toxic exposure, with innovative thinkers on the relations between infrastructure, temporality and political economy. By examining what happens to scientific, industrial and transport infrastructures over time, workshop participants reflect on how configurations of political economy generate specific relations between anticipation and memory (including that of bodies and environments), between accumulation and dispossession, between exposure and knowledge, and between continuity and fragmentation.

Part of the Civic Matter: Infrastructure as Politic (main page)