Toxic remains: Infrastructural failure in a Ugandan molecular biology lab

Abstract

This article complicates romances of infrastructural improvisation by describing infrastructural failures that expose researchers to hazardous chemicals in a Ugandan molecular biology lab. To meet project deadlines, to make careers and to participate in transnational collaborative projects, Ugandan biologists have to stand in for decaying or absent infrastructures with their bodies. Ugandan biologists hide such sacrifices from their international scientific partners and direct the blame elsewhere. An unclear culpability results precisely from the ways in which power works and is distributed across transnational scientific infrastructures.

A failing anthropology of colonial failure: following a driver's uniform found at Amani research station, Tanzania

“…Ethnographies of Africa's modernist ruins, inspired by James Ferguson's (1999) recognition of colonial and postcolonial remnants as key strata of contemporary social reality, provide rich accounts of architecture (Hoffmann 2017; Smith 2018), industry and extraction (Hecht 2018; Mususa 2022), infrastructure (Kopf 2022; Yarrow 2017), health care, and science (Calkins 2021; Droney 2014; Prince 2020). These show that modern ruins are not inert sites of loss and ending, but lived with, pushing beyond their sometimes stubborn original forms, used and altered, ripe with multiple temporalities and unfulfilled promises (Tousignant 2013).…”

Between the Lab and the Field: Plants and the Affective Atmospheres of Southern Science

“…Today, just like the Ugandan–Australian science collaboration I examine, North–South scientific collaborative projects are typically directed by principal investigators from wealthy countries that receive the funds and set the agenda, whereas institutions in the Global South typically are junior partners, consigned to “applied” or data collection work (Crane 2013; Lachenal 2015, 10; Geissler et al 2016, 250; Okeke 2018). While important work along those lines exposed the disturbing infrastructural inequalities between science in the Global North and South (Tousignant 2013; Droney 2014; Ureta 2020; Okeke 2020; Calkins 2021), this paper attends to finer grained differences in the valuation of place and labor within Uganda as well as between Uganda and Australia.…”

“…The Ugandan lab by contrast is much more unstable. Like other labs in the Global South (Tousignant 2018; Ureta 2020), it is a site of improvisation and it suffers from frequent water, power and other shortages (Calkins 2021). When researchers who had traveled abroad had to improvise, they told me what they “actually” would have to do, what would happen in “a real lab,” or “at the Australian lab.” These contrasts scientists draw underline the difficulties of establishing the generic features of labs and draw attention to them as tangible places that unfold their own affective dynamics.…”

“…The Ugandan lab by contrast is much more unstable. Like other labs in the Global South (Tousignant 2018;Ureta 2020), it is a site of improvisation and it suffers from frequent water, power and other shortages (Calkins 2021). When researchers who had traveled abroad had to improvise, they told me what they "actually" would have to do, what would happen in "a real lab," or "at the Australian lab."…”

“…One part of the story are material inequalities between places and especially the often crumbling research infrastructures in the Global South (for instance, Tousignant 2013; Droney 2014; Ureta 2020; Calkins 2021). This paper also draws attention to such inequalities but additionally foregrounds subtler hierarchies that unfold between different places and affect the distribution of labor.…”