Of Scallops and Mobile Phones: Fixity and Fluidity in an Academic Project to Train Health Workers in Kenya

• In Event: Classic STS Papers, Re-incorporated, Reimagined, Re-enacted - II

Abstract

What can scallops tell us about digital technology projects for global development? In this talk, I describe how Callon’s classic paper on translation (1984) was re-staged in my ethnography of an academic-led, mobile learning project for Kenyan health workers. While stories of translation are often critiqued by STS scholars as static, apolitical, linear and devoid of controversy, I will show that the adoption of Callon’s concepts does not necessarily preclude the incorporation of alternative, post-structural approaches. To the contrary, I illustrate how my ethnographic data retained its complexity through each successive moment of translation, affording new occasions to integrate more contemporary material-semiotic devices related to multiplicity (Mol 2002), fluidity (de Laet and Mol 2000), the material-discursive apparatus (Barad 1998), boundary infrastructure (Bowker and Star 1999) and critical care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011; Murphy 2015). I argue that fixity as well as fluidity were important inter-related elements in this empirical tale of digital innovation in Kenya, which necessitated the weaving together of both classic and “post-ANT” sensibilities. Reflecting on my writing in light of the rise of market-friendly humanitarian design and the demise of infrastructure (Redfield 2016), I conclude that now is the moment to temper our “academic affections” for “fluid” concepts, by revisiting classic STS works that help bring neglected enactments of fixity back into our narratives.

Author

• Jade Vu Henry, Goldsmiths, University of London