Lost

Trust in medicine after the EVD epidemic

This research project by Sung-Joon Park & Uli Beisel investigates in collaboration with several African Universities the social, medical, and historical conditions of the formation of trust in medicine in African contexts.

Measures of Future Health

This workshop is the third in a series of workshops on "Making Evidence, Designing Futures". It aspires to examine how measurements, predictions and evidence build particular futures and healths. The workshop is organized in cooperation with the New School for Social Research.

At One of the LOST Events

Pauline, René, Fazil, Bert and Richard at the Workshop “Practicing Uncertainty” in Amsterdam, July 6, 2017.

Recent Publications

MAKING EVIDENCE, DESIGNING FUTURES

This program inquires into the production of evidence under conditions of uncertainty and how this relates to the enactment of futures. It starts from the assertion that modern public life implicates the quest for ‘matters of fact’ that are institutionally certified as objective. This quest results from the jurido-political pursuit of accountability in ordering practices, which incriminates predictability of future scenarios. As such the program is located in the anthropology of knowledge production and science and technology studies (STS). It focuses on the production of techno-scientific knowledge by investigating how evidence is made and comes to matter. We suggest that examining how certain matters of fact are certified provides crucial insights into the futures people design for the conduct of public life in the face of invincible uncertainty.

ABOUT THE LOST RESEARCH NETWORK

While Anthropology is well-established as a discipline, Organization Studies and STS are vigorous transdisciplinary fields. A growing academic current mingles these three fields and thereby engenders provocative insights. Working at the intersection of these fields and fusing their approaches, we emphasize the legal and ethical dimensions of fact-making in the contemporary. The acronym LOST stands for Law, Organization, Science and Technology. The ambition of our detailed ethnographies is to respond to long-standing questions raised in social theory and philosophy and vice-versa, to render those questions into ethnographic inquiries. We address issues of planetary scope, although several of our empirical projects are situated in Africa. Since its inception in 2002, LOST has expanded – from a small group localized in Halle to a decentralized network of independent scholars.