History of mining and signs of its industrial past still physically visible.
same time zone as Europe (864).
Pollock does not go into detail about her own data practices but mentions that “since beginning my research on this project in 2010, I have interviewed several members of iThemba’s management and scientific advisory board – some in the United States and the United Kingdom, some in South Africa – and I have taken four ethnographic trips to iThemba’s labs in the outskirts of Johannesburg. All of the scientists at iThemba agreed to participate in multiple open-ended interviews, and I also attended their lab meetings and did participant observation onsite.” This suggests the kind of ethnographic data she collected although it doesn’t detail storage, sharing, etc.
There are photographs by the author included in the paper.
On anonymity: “Unlike the management and scientific advisory board of iThemba, the on-site scien- tists are not public figures, and so I try to make sure that individuals are not identifiable when I quote them below, even though this has the unfortunate effect of making their voices somewhat disembodied. (861)”
Pollock includes direct quotes in block paragraphs in the paper.
The author doesn’t talk explicitly about flows of data but does note that the Gates Foundation grants presume a unidirectionality of global knowledge flows. Majority of grants are given to scientists working in North America. System is set to organize technical objects but not technical subjects. (854)
Pollock includes a quote from interlocutor to demonstrate how ethical value, economic value, and epistemological value comingle (and draws on Ann Kelly and Wenzel Geissler’s (2012) evocative triad) (866).
Self-reliance emerges as a theme that the South African interlocutors desired. Not just independence or reparations but “a place in the world” (quoting Ferguson 2006). (866).
Quoting her interlocutors, Pollock discusses how they saw the importance of ‘taking responsibility for AIDS’ and other infectious diseases is often linked with the moral imperative for South African scientists to focus on the needs not only of the global or even the South African elite, but also of the poor and black South African majority.” (866)
Quote from interlocutor: “we haven’t seen much of science responding the actual needs. What it means for science to address the needs down in my home town, where they are facing [TB and HIV]. And so that is where my social aspect comes from, is how to do you make science respond. Science and education needs to address what we are facing in this country.” (867)
She does not explicitly discuss their data practices.
Studying a synthetic-chemistry-based company, specifically the perspectives of iThemba’s drug discovery scientists, who comprise two groups: members of the company’s management and scientific advisory board, who are internationally trained and based in the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and South Africa, and bench scientists, who are trained in South Africa and working in Johannesburg (850).
Pollock draws on the Comaroffs (postcolonial scholars from Africa). She puts herself in conversation with STS work on laboratories in the global South and argues for a material analysis of them, especially looking at how place figures into laboratory sciences.
Pollock includes a slogan that emerged from her interviews “African solutions for African problems” - this is something that also circulates VERY much in the Kenyan tech context as a justification for why Kenya (and Kenyans) are uniquely positioned to make tech in Kenya (851). Pollock notes that in this notion of ‘African solutions’, ‘African’ refers to African labs and scientists, not African plants or traditional healers. The endeavor of these scientists is not African in any ethnoscience sense, but it is rooted in place.”
Pollock draws on sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasonoff and Kim) as vital sites for imagining collective visions of society.
Pollock draws on the work about African botanical knowledge done by Osseo-Asare and Langwick); Alondra Nelson’s concept of bioculture brokers (688); Warwick Anderson’s “conjugated subjects.”
Pollock mentions histories of mining, apartheid, and structural adjustment as shaping the landscape of her topic. She also mentions IP law: “This is part of why knowledge production in South Africa is high stakes: the place of IP has always been assumed to be the Global North, and if that collocation can be unraveled, it shifts the place of science in postcolonial orders.” (867)
“What if postcolonial Africa were to become a prominant place of not just raw materials and end users but of the basic science of pharmaceutical knowledge-making?” (849)
Pollock recognizes the problematics of the bifurcation between global South/North but notes that “Africa” is an actor’s category and marks inequalities that cannot be ignored. She distinguishes between global science and local knowledge in her analysis: “Whereas ethnographic exploration of efforts to pharmaceutically exploit botanical products and traditional knowledge foregrounds the conflict between local knowledge and global science (Hayden, 2003; Langwick, 2011), iThemba offers an opportunity to explore a Global South site that seeks not to translate local knowledge into global science, but to participate in global science itself.” (855).
She seems to be favoring the eco and nano levels of analysis, largely focusing on how the scientists imagine the future. She notes the historical and ecological conditions that have shaped the current moment.