Lives in African Science: Boundary-work in Careers of Natural Science Researchers in Kenya

• In Event: STS & Africa - I: Bodies and Biomedicine

Abstract

This paper explores science in Africa as a profession and way of life. We ask: How are scientific careers enacted in Africa? How are careers co-shaped along with the social, economic and political continuities and discontinuities that surround them? Data come from biographical, narrative interviews conducted with agricultural and biological scientists in Kenya. Respondents were part of a sample of researchers first interviewed in 1994, providing a chance to explore career trajectories across at least 20 years as a scientist (often 30 years or more). We critically apply a central STS concept -- boundary-work -- to help understand how scientific careers are constructed. We argue that while many careers are bounded within one institution, scientists actively manage many different types of boundaries throughout a career in order to get research done and advance professionally, including: boundaries between public institutions and the state, between different kinds of public institutions, and between scientific disciplines and identities. By looking at the positionality of actors doing the boundary-work, and at how actors can make their own agency invisible, a careers-based approach to understanding science in Africa can show what is distinctive to the continent, and be instructive for the field of STS.

Authors

• Matthew Harsh, Cal Poly

• Wesley Shrum, Louisiana State University

• Ravtosh Bal, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

• Mark J Joseph Schafer, LSU AgCenter

• Paige Miller, University of Wisconsin, River Falls