Environmental Memory, Bodies and ‘Scientific’ Knowledge in West African Extractive Landscapes

In collaboration with the West African Research Association (WARA), this panel invites contributions examining how understandings of extractive environments and human bodies in West Africa are produced across laboratories, colonial offices, medical records, instruments, and lived experience passed across generations.
Recent scholarship in the history of science and STS shows that scientific knowledge is locally constructed through interactions among institutions, instruments, and social actors (Latour 1987; Jasanoff 2004; Rheinberger 1997). At the same time, historians of empire and environment demonstrate that colonial and postcolonial sciences depended heavily on African intermediaries, ecological familiarity, and practical expertise even while denying them formal authority (Raj 2007; Tilley 2011; Jacobs 2016). To frame this discussion, we ask: How do scientific practices and indigenous environmental memory meet, negotiate, and reshape understandings of extractive landscapes in West Africa?
Rather than treating Western science as a single authoritative interpretive tool, the panel examines encounters between scientific and indigenous knowledge systems, tracing where they converged, mistranslated, conflicted, or stabilized into shared practices of knowing.
Submission and Participation
We invite panelists to submit a title, a 200-word abstract, and a brief biographical note (100 words) outlining their contributions’, argument, sources, and methodological approach. Contributions should clearly engage the panel’s central concern: how West African extractive environments and indigenous bodies become sites where different forms of evidence are produced, negotiated, and contested.
We particularly encourage participation from across disciplines, including history, history of science, anthropology, geography, archaeology, environmental humanities, STS, public health, geology, and related fields, as well as scholars working with oral history, archives, ecological data, mapping, or community-engaged research.

Organizers

Uzoamaka Nwachukwu, Indiana University Bloomington 
Predoctoral Fellow, Dept II, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
and
Vitalis Nwashindu, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

The deadline for submission is March 12, 2026.
Submissions should be sent to: africamininghistory@gmail.com