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Science, Technology, and Medicine Seminar 2021-22 Series Trans-Speciated Thinking: Rat Training as Epistemological Practice in TanzaniaDATE: March 30, 2022 (Wednesday)
This paper positions rodent trainers in Tanzania as philosophers of the mind who explore, propose, and critique the experiences of being human through their speculation of rodent minds. Rodent trainers in Tanzania speculate about rodent minds as a way to understand how best to train them to detect landmines as part of an international humanitarian project. I draw on these trainers’ experiences of working with rats to analyze how they participate in a long, cross-disciplinary history of thinking about cognition that depend on careful observations of rodent behaviors. In speculating about rodent learning and cunning, rodent trainers subsequently reflect on the importance of “hekima,” an intelligent ability to understand and participate in social relations that foster solidarity and social wellbeing in Tanzanian society. I further situate this “working theory of mind” within the social inequalities that Tanzanian trainers confront while working for an international NGO. This paper forms part of a larger research project that builds on ongoing critiques in Black studies, anthropology, and science & technology studies about “post/humanism,” and suggests that scholars begin to look to Africa for “counterhumanisms.” Speaker: Jia Hui Lee (Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Haverford College) Jia Hui Lee is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College. His research project, Interstitial Intelligence: Human-Rodent Sensing, Cognition, and Work in Morogoro, Tanzania, is a historically informed ethnography of various human-rodent encounters in zoological research, animal training, and pest management schemes. He examines how rodent researchers, trappers, and trainers produce new knowledges, sensory capacities, and technologies, and their entanglements with colonial legacies, global inequities, and speculations about the future. More broadly, his research argues that such more-than-human encounters are crucial sites for generating theories and critiques that offer a counterhumanist vision of being "human" in 21st-century Africa. He has a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a MPhil from the University of Cambridge. Discussant: Susan Levine (Professor and Head of Anthropology, University of Cape Town) Susan Levine is Professor and Head of Anthropology at The University of Cape Town. She is a medical anthropologist whose research focusses on toxic landscapes, children and childhoods, virological and biomedical science, and with new work in vaccine hesitancy in South Africa. Susan leads a new MA program called Health Humanities and the Arts, which brings artists, medical workers and social scientists into conversation. Moderator: Laura Meek (Assistant Professor, Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, HKU)
Hosted by: Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, HKU All are welcome. Please register and the Zoom link will be sent to you prior to the event. For enquiries, please contact Mr. Adrian Kam by email at adkam@hku.hk or by phone at +852 39172867. Visit our website: https://chm.hku.hk/
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