In the wake of the decolonization movement in South Africa and around the world, this edited work presents fresh evidence and advances new arguments on the politics and economics of colonial biomedical knowledge in South Africa and other parts of the African continent. Covering a richly diverse set of fields—including human genetics, obstetrics, occupational therapy, medical photography and the vaccine sciences—the book demonstrates the troubled histories and the enduring effects of imperial knowledge decades since the end of colonial rule and apartheid. This is a valuable text on the politics of the biomedical sciences written from the perspective of the African continent, and at the same time it revisits knowledge/power relationships between the majority (“global South”) and minority (“global north”) words in a historical perspective and in their contemporary expression in the disciplines. The immediate benefit is a reference resource for medical science researchers, and a teaching text for senior undergraduate and postgraduate students. The book is further composed as an accessible, readable and interesting text on politics and medicine in Africa for the discerning lay reader.
Table of Content
An introduction to the politics of knowledge in medicine.- The invention of the Birthsuit: Medicine, the body and science in South African history.- Visualizing medicine: Photographing patients in 20th century South Africa.- Tied up in the genes: Racial biomedicine and the politics of knowledge.- “The reconfirmation of the same”: Recent genetic studies of the “Afrikaner population”.- Racism, colonialism, and the structure of medical knowledge in the Global COVID-19 vaccination campaign.- When not to decolonize.- Unmasked faces and tight vaginas: The politics of health rumors in Burkina Faso.- French biomedicine in Morocco: Data capitalism and imperial extractivism.- How the history and politics of occupational therapy shapes the profession and its practitioners.- The medicalization of the mind: On the politics of knowledge in clinical psychology.
About the author
Jonathan D. Jansen is a Distinguished Professor of Education at Stellenbosch University and President of the Academy of Science of South Africa. He is a curriculum theorist, and his research is concerned with the politics of knowledge. His most recent and co-authored book is The Decolonization of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and he holds a MSc from Cornell and a Ph D from Stanford University.
Jess Auerbach is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town and a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study. Jess is an anthropologist of knowledge systems, and her work spans the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. She has written two recent books, one on the emerging Angolan Middle Class and one on everyday kindness during the South African Covid-19 pandemic. She holds an MSc from Oxford and a Ph D from Stanford University and is a P-rated Scholar with the National Research Foundation.
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