Can the Subaltern Be Global? African Perspectives on the Structure of Globalization

Abstract

Page 176 Africa in the World: Shifting Boundaries and Knowledge Production and treatment agendas of many global and public health efforts all over the world. While numerous studies have examined the barriers along the HIV cascade of care that make eradicating AIDS a challenge in sub-Saharan Africa, fewer research projects have centered on the local impact of these biomedical HIV interventions from the perspectives and experiences of those living on the ground and in communities where eradication is underway. Drawing on ethnographic research in a highway trading center in Kenya, as well as Tsing’s notion of friction, this paper demonstrates how current global heath technologies used to eradicate AIDS (e.g. HIV tests, HAART) when inserted into particular social, moral, and political contexts, sometimes get put to use in unexpected ways, including for local projects aimed at (re)negotiating gender dynamics and inequalities. Richard Schroeder, Rutgers University Remote Control: Conservation Surveillance and Technologies of Power Power is increasingly being deployed by well-placed conservation actors over species and spaces of concern through sophisticated – in many cases modified military – technologies which seek to manage, govern, and produce knowledge about habitats and the bodies of non-human subjects; for example, see the use of conservation drones, camera traps, realtime monitoring, satellite based remote sensing platforms, microphones/bioacoustic sensors, critter cams, radar, subcutaneous internal monitoring, and dna forensic sampling. Additionally, computers running state-of-the-art programs, complicated algorithms, and ecological models, are increasingly being called upon in conservation for predictive purposes to anticipate how climate change might impact species ranges, how environmental conditions and weather events might impact migration, even how a particular animal might behave in response to given stimuli, in effect distancing researcher from subject as they are made virtual objects of management. In my presentation, I will review technologies being deployed at the frontier of conservation, and I will discuss the meaning of these changes for how researchers relate to non-human species. I will analyze how and where power is expressed through these new techniques, and consider potential consequences of such modes of governance for both humans and non-humans. Tezera Tazebew, University of Gondar Can the Subaltern Be Global? African Perspectives on the Structure of Globalization We live in an age defined by globalization. Worldwide, the quintessential transformation of our age is globalization. Africa’s place in the world can’t be rightly examined without a due attention be given to globalization. Much has been said, and written about the globalizing world where we live now and the benefits and impacts of globalization to Africa. Often the beneficiaries are assumed to the free traders, the powerful multinational corporations, and African elites. In this view, globalization is taken to be the sport of the ‘Westerners’, Europeans and North Americans. The non-Westerners are the dominated, subordinated subjects. This essay attempts to provide a critical reflection on globalization in Africa. After historical-qualitative analysis, the paper argues that even if marginalized, the subalterns still display multifaceted agency in the globalization processes. Everyday lived experiences of the ordinary people are indications how the subaltern be globalized in the African context. Robert Thornton, University of the Witwatersrand Artisanal Craft and Expert Knowledge in Africa: The Neglected Role of Specialised and Individualised Knowledge Practices Generalising, we can say that African knowledge and technologies are usually attributed to ‘cultures’, or ‘societies’, when in fact specialised knowledge is held and practiced by individuals or restricted ‘schools’ or guilds. The personal, specialised, restricted, even