PHARMACY, MONEY AND PUBLIC HEALTH IN DAKAR.

Pharmacy students at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar must research and write a thesis to graduate. Thésards who took topics in analytical chemistry and toxicology describe their thesis work as a temporary opportunity to perform 'street-level' public health research that they regard as 'relevant' to the quality of people's lives. Expecting futures in the private commercial sector, thésards regretfully leave the thesis behind. This article explores the parenthetical nature of this moment - its brief openings and more durable closures - as part of the history of ways of being a pharmacist in post-colonial Senegal. The thesis as an interlude in students' biographies, curtailed by narrowed horizons of expectation, evokes other contractions: in the range of professional roles open to Senegalese pharmacists, and in the circuits of public health with which they might engage. For thésards, fieldwork, government work and commercial work entail spatial practices and imaginations; different ways of moving around the city and of tracing urban space that define pharmacists' roles in terms of the modes through which they engage with broader collectivities. Mapping thésards' parenthesis in Dakar is a means of capturing both their urban experience of work and the intertwining spatial, temporal and affective dimensions associated with this work. The past, probable and possible trajectories of pharmacy work are imprinted and imagined in the space of the city as field, market and polis. Pharmacists' prospects and aspirations are caught up in broader shifts in how education, (un)employment and entrepreneurship animate relations of association and exchange in Senegal

Residual unprotection: aflatoxin research and regulation in Senegal's postcolonial peanut infrastructures

In the early 1960s, a potentially carcinogenic substance, aflatoxin, was identified in peanuts. In this article, I explore how aflatoxin was known – and unknown – through and for the infrastructures designed, from the late nineteenth century, to stimulate and support peanut farming in Senegal. Anticipated European standards stimulated a narrow field of knowledge and know-how oriented towards control-for-export, bypassing Senegalese farms, food, and bodies. Investigations of aflatoxin's carcinogenicity were actively suppressed, challenged, and silenced. That (post)colonial infrastructures supported peanuts as an export cash crop and a target of European regulation – but not as part of local ecologies and foodways – mattered for how they were deemed (not) worth knowing as potentially contaminated and carcinogenic from the 1960s. I develop the notion of residual unprotection to highlight how the enduring effects of colonial infrastructures distributed (through regulatory gaps) and obscured (through non-knowledge) the potential harmfulness of aflatoxin in Senegal

Vectoral Fieldsites

English Abstract: The Niakhar area of West-Central Senegal has hosted regular demographic data collection as well as health and social scientific research since the 1960s. In this article, I approach Niakhar’s long history of research as a window into changing relations between knowledge production and modes (and scales) of government. Through close examination of three studies conducted between 1962 and 1974, I seek in particular to capture how the utopian impulses of postcolonial national development in Senegal created epistemological opportunities and frames of meaning for social scientific research. While this development ideology was utopian in the general sense of its transformative ambitions, it was also utopian in a more specifically spatial sense, in that Senegal had to be transformed into ‘another place’ to break the hold of the colonial political economy and release the full potential of the nation. Social scientists evoked this emerging national territory to make claims for what I call a vectoral relation between the subjects and spaces they produced through research and those the state would generate through planning, surveying and intervention. I contrast this vectoral spatiality with the scalar claims made for post-developmental uses of Niakhar as a site of experimental and longitudinal research. French Abstract: La zone de Niakhar, dans le centre-ouest du Sénégal, accueille depuis les années 1960 une collecte régulière de données démographiques ainsi que des recherches en sciences édicales et sociales. Dans cet article, j’aborde la longue histoire de la recherche à Niakhar comme une fenêtre sur les relations changeantes entre la production de connaissances et les modes (et échelles) de gouvernement. En examinant de près trois études menées entre 1962 et 1974, je cherche en particulier à saisir comment les impulsions utopiques du développement national postcolonial au Sénégal ont créé des opportunités épistémologiques et des cadres de signification pour la recherche en sciences sociales. Si cette idéologie du développement était utopique au sens général de ses ambitions transformatrices, elle l’était aussi dans un sens plus spécifiquement spatial, en ce sens que le Sénégal devait être transformé en un « autre lieu » pour briser l’emprise de l’économie politique coloniale et libérer le plein potentiel de la nation. Les chercheurs en sciences sociales évoquaient ce territoire national émergent pour revendiquer ce que j’appelle une relation vectorielle entre les sujets et les espaces qu’ils produisaient par la recherche et ceux que l’État générerait par la planification, les enquêtes et l’intervention. Je contraste cette spatialité vectorielle avec les revendications scalaires faites pour des utilisations post-développementales de Niakhar en tant que site de recherche expérimentale et longitudinale

Pain and the pursuit of objectivity : pain-measuring technologies in the United States, c1890-1975

Since the late 19th century, scientists and clinicians have generated an astonishing array of meters, scales, experimental designs, and questionnaires to quantify pain with more precision, accuracy, and objectivity. In this thesis, I follow the development and implementation of pain-measuring technologies in the United States until the mid-1970s. Focussing on how these technologies work, I analyse the relationship between practices of objectification; the social, material and technical resources on which these practices depend; and changing conceptions of pain, subjectivity and objectivity.Surprisingly, as efforts to objectify pain were intensified, pain was increasingly conceptualised as a subjective experience, that is, as a phenomenon inextricably tied to the unique emotional, psychological, and social condition of the experiencing self. I argue that this transformation was not solely due to the development of new theoretical models of pain, but also, importantly, enabled by the implementation of new technologies that could measure pain as an individual and psychological phenomenon. I also argue that the successful implementation of these technologies depended on the availability of specific social, material, and technical resources, and examine the social settings in which these resources were made available.The main motivation for the direct investment of new resources towards pain-measuring technologies was a desire to make analgesic drug testing more objective. Beginning in the late 1930s, professional, industrial and public health interests in drug addiction, opiate pharmacology, new drug development and therapeutic testing converged on the goal of better pain-measurement. By the 1950s, the organisation and funding of analgesic testing made it possible to implement and validate the analgesic clinical trial, a technology that determined analgesic efficacy by measuring collective pain and its relief. The validity of the clinical was based on procedural and statistical control of data collection and analysis, rather than on the standardisation of individual experiences and evaluations of pain. It became possible to think of pain relief as an inevitably idiosyncratic experience, open to multiple sources of psychological variation, and yet still measure it consistently and objectively on a collective level.Keywords. pain; measurement; objectivity; subjectivity, clinical trials; analgesics: psychophysics; psychosomatics; history of medicine; history of science

INTRODUCTION: SUSTAINING THE LIFE OF THE POLIS.

How are publics of protection and care defined in African cities today? The effects of globalization and neo-liberal policies on urban space are well documented. From London to São Paulo, denationalization, privatization, offshoring and cuts in state expenditure are creating enclaves and exclusions, resulting in fragmented, stratified social geographies (see Caldeira 2000; Ong 2006; Harvey 2006; Murray 2011). 'Networked archipelagoes', islands connected by transnational circulations of capital, displace other spatial relations and imaginaries. Spaces of encompassment, especially, such as 'the nation' or simply 'society' as defined by inclusion within a whole, lose practical value and intellectual purchase as referents of citizenship (Gupta and Ferguson 2002; Ferguson 2005). In African cities, where humanitarian, experimental or market logics dominate the distribution of sanitation and healthcare, this fragmentation is particularly stark (see, for example, Redfield 2006, 2012; Fassin 2007; Bredeloup et al. 2008; Nguyen 2012). Privilege and crisis interrupt older contiguities, delineating spaces and times of exception. The 'public' of health is defined by survival or consumption, obscuring the human as bearer of civic rights and responsibilities, as inhabitants of 'objective' material worlds 'common to all of us' (Arendt 1958: 52). Is it possible, under these conditions, to enact and imagine public health as a project of citizens, animated in civic space

Chapitre 5. Les fils qui relient les passés. De l’étude démographique du Sine-Saloum à l’histoire de Niakhar

Célébrer le cinquantenaire de Niakhar : qu’est-ce que cela signifie ? Depuis le début des années 1960, une aire géographique située dans la région administrative de Niakhar – tantôt un arrondissement au complet, tantôt un, ou huit, ou douze, ou trente de ses villages – a été visitée, parfois même habitée, par des équipes scientifiques. Diverses études – socio-anthropologiques, cliniques, géographiques ou épidémiologiques – y ont été menées, souvent dans un cadre pluridisciplinaire. En quoi ce..

Insects-as-Infrastructure: Indicating, Project Locustox and the Sahelization of Ecotoxicology

Infrastructure, as a potential legacy of transnational scientific collaborations, is usually seen as extrinsic to the immediate production of knowledge. But cumulative collaborative scientific workwhat scientists actually do together; the ways in which they act on the world and transform our understanding of itcan also help create durable enabling environments for ongoing scientific practice. Project Locustox began in 1989 as a pilot to evaluate the environmental effect of locust control pesticides in the Sahel. It was prolonged through additional project phases over the next decade; in 1999, a locally-administered permanent ecotoxicological research centre was established in Senegal. Central to this project was the creation of Sahelian bio-indicators. The work of indicating, which was largely performed with and by insects, can be described as enacting infrastructure. Insects formed an axis along which data and expertise were accumulated, and, as a result, they were stabilized as durable toolsas bodies, colonies and the techniques for manipulating themfor future Sahelian ecotoxicology. Considering insects as producing infrastructure invites a reflection on the possibilities and difficulties of scientific capacity-building in the Global South. Specifically, examining the temporal extensions of indicating work leads to an account of how sustained investment in continuous collaborative scientific work can draw together biological entities, techniques, knowledge, materials, working relations and institutions to build durable capacity for science; but insect indicators also reveal the costs of and obstacles to maintaining the integration of methodological, material and institutional components of infrastructure

Annexe 5.2. Pourquoi le terroir, Pourquoi Sob ?

En 1964, les géographes Paul Pélissier et Gilles Sautter lançaient un appel à la multiplication d’études monographiques, “dans un esprit géographique impliquant l’analyse du paysage humanisé, à l’intérieur d’un espace nettement circonscrit,” qu’ils proposaient de rassembler dans un Atlas des terroirs africains (Sautter & Pélissier 1964 : 57). À l’opposé de l’image (coloniale) d’une agriculture africaine partout pareillement transitoire, ne laissant qu’une empreinte éphémère et superficielle, ..