Turkey is offered by Aybike Alkan, Duygu Kaşdoğan, and Maral Erol as a landscape of three fragmented luminosities—of universities, art-science discussion spaces (including a documentary film) outside the university, and journal experiments with situated perspectives of mental health patients and their psychiatrists. These are spaces of STS par excellence, but, as they argue, they are also spaces of struggle against the twin incursions of state control and neoliberal market evaluative metrics and criteria of value. The stakes are high. Defending the autonomy of the university, of a free press, and of freedom of opinion in the public arena have all come under increasing attack by the Erdogan government. Within the university there are struggles for intellectual autonomy, democratization of knowledge production, and cross-disciplinary fertilization; and these goals, in part, can be aided by work adjacent to the university in newspapers, and art-science sites such as IstanbuLab sets up.
How then does a new quasi-discipline find its footing? At least three types of answers are illustrated, each with limitations and criticisms: (in the first half) competing for accreditation and ranking on the international stage (Bilkent); alliance with state science policy agencies (METU and Tubitak), and (in the second half) the pragmatic indirection of the “probing arts” (IstanbuLab, newspaper opinion columns, Sizofrengi). A modest suggestion is to pay attention also to STS scholars working on Turkey who live outside Turkey, and in so doing expand narrow reference frames of STS as defined in Europe to broader anthropological STS ones concerned with more comparative and substantive issues.
To read further, please follow this link.
In the slow turn away from speculative philosophy to grounded ethnography, from the “ontological” turn to the ecological turn, from presentism to future scenario-and-design thinking, and from linguistic enclosures to curiosity about translation across linguistic-and-cultural grammars (other ways of thinking), a new open-access online journal from, but maybe not in or about, Japan has poked its head up. The new semi-annual journal NatureCulture, among other things, is an experiment in self-publishing.
It seems not to be locatable in the Hollis catalogue (the library portal of Harvard University which also links to other libraries, and in itself is the second largest research library in the United States after the Library of Congress), but it is easily locatable online by just typing in the name in a search engine. It is peer-reviewed, with prominent editors, contributors, and advisory board. It has been welcomed and introduced by EASTS (the International Journal of East Asian Science and Technology Studies) as one of a number of companion journals. The editors of NatureCulture tend to locate themselves as anthropologists with interests in STS, while also smitten by speculative philosophy memes. They locate themselves as engaging with contradictory imperatives, “staying with the trouble” as Haraway has memorably put it.
To read further, please follow this link.
One might say that thirdspaces or thirdplaces (based in FLACSO) as developed by María Belén Albornoz and Gaudys Sanclemente (2019) and Maka Suarez and Jorge Nuñez (2019a, 2019b, 2019c), are the inverse or negative space of NatureCulture. The first is politically and ethnographically located; the latter is largely located in the cloud. Thirdspaces also contrasts with informal networks of the kinds described in Turkey and Kenya. Thirdspaces build incrementally with political-institutional purpose (“to change the social system”); the others work as discussion spaces or networked NGOs. The place of online work is an important tool, but not always a primary one in thirdspaces. Other digital tools such digital data sets will become more and more important as state statistics become more available and debatable.
Three readings are possible of the current Ecuador STS situation: FLACSO as a creation of thirdspaces (multiple campuses across Latin American countries); state capture of the political mobilizing slogans of pluri-nation and sumak kawsay, the fate of Yachay Technical University and Knowledge City; and indigenous media and investigative journalism.
The model of thirdspaces is one of creating learning communities at the local level (which the Kibera example might also be); then evolving epistemic-moral communities that can be stabilized through academic programs, centers, and summer schools; and then insert themselves in government policy making and Ministry deliberations (both as a form of recognized expertise, and through networks of former STS students in government). The Ecuadorian thirdspaces model also draws upon regional Latin American research traditions (including collective rather than individual research and journalism), as well as enrolling scholars from Europe and the United States. For an important overview of Latin American STS programs in the first issue of the new Latin American journal, Tapuya (see Kreimer and Vessuri 2018).
To read further, please follow this link.
Kenya provides two of the most recent technologies of digital transformation: M-Pesa and Ushahidi, the one allowing a leapfrogging, past the slow wiring of telephony, into the digital worlds of credit and communicative mobility, the other an open source platform for mapping troubles and supplying emergency relief. Nearby across the southern border on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania, is Olduvai Gorge, one of the places from which we mark the beginnings of homo sapiens’ history, and the spread of our genomic diversity—genomics being one of our newest digital sciences, and one with an important contemporary history via agricultural biotechnology since Kenyan independence (see Juma 2023, discussed in length later in the text).
So, it is wonderful to have an ethnographic report from founding members of i-Hub in Nairobi, established in 2010–11, a spin-off of Ushahidi, as not just a focal point for the meme of “Rising Africa,” but as a localized place in Nairobi, a long-time space of STS-like beginnings, if not yet of a disciplinary STS formation. i-Hub became an important first “pit stop” for diplomats and international visitors who wanted to see Kenya’s “Silicon Savanah.” The two authors, who style themselves as a White Asian-American woman and a Black Kenyan woman, worked at i-Hub for five years (2010–2015). As former members of i-Hub, they see themselves as positioned both as researchers and as objects of research, a double-vision situatedness, conducive for cultural critique and STS perspectives, both of i-Hub as one of the first of now hundreds of co-work spaces across Africa, and as a start-up in its first phase before being bought by enterprises with sustainability in mind.
The figure of the Techpreneur arose, they suggest, out of the Post-Election Violence (PEV) of 2007–08 in which over a thousand Kenyans lost their lives, resolved temporarily only by a power-sharing agreement, and through which government lost trust in its legitimacy. As with the ordoliberal economic miracle in post-war Germany (Foucault [2004] 2008), the figure of the Techpreneur offered a non-governmental, technical fix, a potential democratic mode of techno-optimism, with all the affordances and diversions of a neoliberal world. The Techpreneur was an “investable” figure “latched onto by state, development aid, and philanthropic sectors,” gaining “circulatory power” through state, international, and non-governmental funding and rhetoric. A start-up culture, dubbed Silicon Savanah, it was hoped, would grow, and lead the way for a continent-wide self-generating entrepreneurial ethos. There was enthusiasm for “Rising Africa.” Built on the rapid spread of mobile phones and laptops, individual and community entrepreneurs could build a new political economy, set apart from slower, government or corporate formations (albeit needing to negotiate and forge new government regulatory and patent sovereignties). M-Pesa and Ushahidi were to lead the way into a digital future, and i-Hub was one of the best branded of a growing number of co-work spaces, fab labs, maker spaces, and start-ups.
To read further, please follow this link.