The Journal of Southern African Studies (JSAS) and the Southern African Institute for Policy and Research (SAIPAR) invite proposals for papers for a conference to be held in Lusaka, Zambia, 16-18 August 2023.
This conference will be in memory of Lyn Schumaker, a former board member of JSAS. Straddling the disciplines of history and anthropology, Lyn researched and published on medicine in modern Africa, environmental history, and the history of anthropology. Her works include Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Duke University Press, 2001). By centring African agency her work questioned the indigenous/metropolitan knowledge dichotomy and considered the prospects for ‘Africanising’ the social sciences more broadly as part of contemporary concerns with decolonising. The themes of the conference reflect the work Lyn worked on. We expect that a special issue will result from a selection of the conference presentations, subject to full peer review.
We invite proposals from scholars working in the social sciences for papers and panels relevant to the theme including, but not limited to, the following subthemes:
Themes:
- African agency in the fields of science, technology and medicine, including both historical and contemporary topics
- The role of the social, cultural and material context of the field-site in shaping knowledge in the ‘field sciences’
- Research assistants, brokers and mediators and knowledge construction in ethnographic fieldwork in southern Africa
- The inter-relations between co-production of ‘indigenous’/’traditional’ and ‘Western’ medical knowledge in Africa, and how thinking about this has changed
- The intersections of environmental and medical history in southern Africa
