Traces of the Future

Paul Wenzel Geissler is a professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo.Guillaume Lachenal is a lecturer at the Universite Paris Diderot, junior fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France.John Manton is Associate Professor in History at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, specialising in the history, heritage and memory of medical research, disease control, and health systems in Africa and Southeast Asia. He has worked at Oxford, Cambridge, Ulster and in London, writing on leprosy and mycobacterial disease control in Nigeria and Cameroon.Noémi Tousignant is affiliate member of the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill, and guest researcher in History at the Université de Montréal. Her work focuses on scientific infrastructure, value, service, and dreaming in Africa. Her book on toxicological capacity and unprotection in Senegal is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

'This elegant, field-defining collection of sparkling originality excels as it curates, joining bits about five modern scientific sites in Africa with playful lines. The entire package suggests vital new affective methods for our times. These unruly junctions will productively challenge STS humanists, ethnographic historians, and students of global health practices. In our times of often ungainly, overtheorized immoderations, their innovative traces and tracing enable thinking deeply about relatively affluent African pasts. In these erstwhile spaces of scientific practice and development dreams, much remains not grim, rather bursting still with whims and guile.'