The emergence of vibrant research communities of computer scientists in Kenya and Uganda has occurred in the context of neoliberal privatization, commercialization, and transnational capital flows from donors and corporations. We explore how this funding environment configures research culture and research practices, which are conceptualized as two main components of a research community. Data come from a three-year longitudinal study utilizing interview, ethnographic and survey data collected in Nairobi and Kampala. We document how administrators shape research culture by building academic (...) programs and training growing numbers of PhDs, and analyze how this is linked to complicated interactions between political economy, the epistemic nature of computer science and sociocultural factors like entrepreneurial leadership of key actors and distinctive cultures of innovation. In a donor-driven funding environment, research practice involves scientists constructing their own localized research priorities by adopting distinctive professional identities and creatively structuring projects. The neoliberal political economic context thus clearly influenced research communities, but did not debilitate computing research capacity nor leave researchers without any agency to carry out research programs. The cases illustrate how sites of knowledge production in Africa can gain some measure of research autonomy, some degree of global competency in a central arena of scientific and technological activity, and some expression of their regional cultural priorities and aspirations. Furthermore, the cases suggest that social analysts must balance structure with culture, place and agency in their approaches to understanding how funding and political economy shape scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This article’s aim is to understand if and how the efforts to accumulate and organize clinical data transformed the regulation of pharmaceutical care. The authors analyze how the employment of databases by collectives of physicians and researchers shape both clinical and policy practice—and thereby reshape the relation between clinical work and policy. Since the late 1990s, Dutch government has supported the development of clinical databases for specific expensive medicines to gain oversight about actual medicine use. To be able to produce (...) evidence for appropriate medicine use, the collectives set regulations in clinical practice. These internal regulations provide a framework for establishing “appropriate medicine use”, steering reimbursement decisions. However, internal regulation and policy rules differ in how quickly they can change. While the employment of databases in clinical practices results in a constant adjustment of the protocols, policy makers require the databases to provide for static moments of “proven appropriate medicine use” in order to account for and define a fixed and closed formulary. Subsequently, the employment of the databases did not deliver on the promise of oversight and control due to different clinical and policy requirements. Nevertheless, the databases did stimulate appropriate medicine use and reimbursement in clinical practice. (shrink)

The three short pieces below are the third set of vignettes in an alphabetically ordered series of entries, which, together, will constitute a non-subject-centered autobiography. Professional memories are merged with personal ones. I call them “vignettes” to underline the fragmentary nature of memory.

This article is an edited version of the response paper offered at the conclusion of the symposium, Modern Sensibilities. It ties together themes from the symposium papers, as well as ideas prompted by Mieke Bal’s exhibition, Emma & Edvard: Love in the Time of Loneliness, and her accompanying book, Emma and Edvard Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic. It focuses on the anachronistic entanglements among Flaubert’s “Emma,” Munch’s motifs, Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker’s Madame B, the Munch Museum’s architecture (...) and exhibition scenography, and the exhibition viewer. (shrink)

This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

The author presents and defends three theses: (1) "the first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology." (2) "the second is that the concepts of obligation, And duty... And of what is morally right and wrong, And of the moral sense of 'ought', Ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible...." (3) "the third thesis is that (...) the differences between the well-Known english writers on moral philosophy from sidgwick to the present day are of little importance." (staff). (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed (...) by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man. (shrink)

This study explores and analyses funerary rite struggles in a nation where Christianity is a comparatively recent phenomenon, and many families have Christian and Hindu, Buddhist and Traditionalist members, who go through traumatic experiences at the death of their family members. The context of mixed affiliation raises questions of social, psychological and religious identity for Christian converts, which are particularly acute after a death in their family. Using empirical research, this thesis focuses on the question of adaptation and identity in (...) relation to church life, within the familial and social sphere of individual Christians and within the wider society in which they live, particularly with reference to death and disposal. This research has used an applied theology approach to explore and analyse the findings in order to address the issue of funerary rites with which the Nepalese church is struggling. For the need of adaptation, this study seeks to understand the funerary rites of the host culture alongside Jewish-Christian characteristics of adaptation, especially in terms of the Nepalese Evangelical Christian context. It also poses the challenge of finding an identity in a wider cultural and societal milieu. The case studies and interviews have portrayed tripartite relationships and tensions between an individual, family and church or community at the death in a ‘split’ family where a Christian convert’s loyalty to the deceased and the family is tested. Participation and non-participation in the last rites create problems for both the church and the family, and some solution needs to be found. The study has discovered that adaptation of the technique of the funerary rites, rather than of their content, could ease this tension in a ‘split’ family, and enhance a family and community’s reconciliation and solidarity. The mode of disposal, whether burial or cremation, could be used and a theology of cremation be developed in order to provide a theological framework. (shrink)

Inclusive businesses that combine profit making with social impact are claimed to hold the potential for poverty alleviation while also creating new entrepreneurial and innovation opportunities. Current research, however, offers little insight on the processes through which for-profit business organizations introduce social innovations that can profitably create social impact. To understand how social innovations emerge and become sustained in business organizations, we studied a telecom firm in Kenya that successfully extended financial services across the country through a number of mobile (...) banking innovations. Our qualitative analysis revealed the strong role of being embedded in local networks and structures for initiating and implementing social innovations. Strong embeddedness enhanced the pragmatic and ethical imperative for internalizing social issues, but also provided access to diverse resources for implementing and legitimizing social innovations. However, hybridization processes that emphasized social issues introduced organizational tensions by increasing goal diversity and requiring adapting organizational processes and structures. The case shows how developing a mission-driven identity enabled the sustenance of social innovations by providing a meta-narrative that bridged goal diversities and rationalized organizational change. (shrink)

A woman is found lying dead on the floor of the living room of her house in Leiden, the Netherlands, and because of a swollen and a slightly wounded eyelid, an autopsy is performed on the body the day after it is found. Behind the wound, there is a whole ballpoint pen, which entered the head of the deceased through her right eye causing mortal brain damage. How did it get there? This question was to cause a stir in Dutch (...) society, holding a group of police detectives and several scientists in its grip for several years. In this article, the ballpoint case is analyzed as to the boundary work between credible and noncredible expertise. As it is often assumed that boundary work in continental law is preempted by the structure of these law models, this case study adds a comparative note to the growing literature about science and the law. (shrink)