Workshop at the *University of Cologne, Germany*, September 18 – 19, 2019.
Recent scholarship has drawn attention to how “practices of experimenting, testing, and
measuring have broken free from the laboratory” (Beisel et al. 2018:109) and how they increasingly invade local epistemic settings in the Global South. We furthermore observe that these experimental interventions are no longer conducted by natural scientists, governments and non-governmental actors alone. Increasingly we also witness how experimental practices are employed by social scientists such as behavioral economists, ethologists, anthropologists, archaeologists and Human-Computer-Interaction Scholars. Apart from experimental
interventions aiming at changing local livelihoods to the better, we, and our interlocutors in the Global South, thus more and more come into contact with scientific experiments which equally have the potential to
change local livelihoods to the better, or worse.
Our workshop aims at scrutinizing the temporal and spatial conditions of such experimental interventions and interventionist experiments by focusing on the ways in which evidence is produced and stabilized in
order to critically question the status of both an experimental politics and science as well as their interventionist claims and approaches. Please see the attached PDF document (Call for Participation) for
further information.
We would like to emphasize that we see this workshop as a working meeting and an opportunity for exchange. We would like to invite interested scientists, especially in earlier phases of their academic careers (PhD candidates and early Postdocs), to join us in tackling this recent transdisciplinary field. Together we aim at identifying new
research desiderata, further conceptualizations and critical questions for future work. We wish to bring together people from different social and cultural sciences who intend to enter into fruitful discussion and
who primarily work in the context of Africa – although we are open to contributions from other areas concerning the Global South. Apart from conventional conference presentations we are open to ethnographic working reports, discussion papers or joint ‘close readings’ of texts with relevant theoretical or conceptualization impulses.
We are happy to announce that a keynote input, in order to frame the workshop thematically, will be given by*Rene Umlauf *(Halle/Wittenberg) on “Who is testing who? Experimentality beyond the laboratory“.
Applications should be send to s.holdermann@uni-koeln.de<mailto:s.holdermann@uni-koeln