ANT6017H: Post-colonial Science Studies and the Cultural Politics of Knowledge Translation

This seminar explores the politics of cultural translation by intersecting Science and Technology Studies (STS) and anthropology. Cultural translation among different worldviews and practices has been foundational to the production of anthropological knowledge, and anthropological inquiries have increasingly been concerned with encounters between technoscience and other knowledge making practices. STS has examined technoscience as a series of processes of "translation" of specific practices and knowledge among various actors and actants, and elucidated how these translation practices generate various — often competing and conflicting — material-semiotic worlds. Recently, the necessity of the postcolonial and decolonial approaches to science has been advocated. We will explore how we might theorize "translation" by reading critical theory and concrete cases, and how anthropological attention to the politics of translation might contribute to responding to this call.

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