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The overarching program of the LOST Research Network involves a focus on practices of evidence making under conditions of deep uncertainty and on the ways in which these are co-constituted with practices of designing 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 juridico-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). Examination of the ways in which 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.

Featured projects

Mobile Mosquitoes

How is the mobility of people and things interlinked with the mobility of mosquitoes and the spread of associated arboviral diseases?

The haunting of colonialism

This study examines the future inscribed into the restitution of artworks originating from the Kingdom of Benin and asks how current articulations of provenance research retain colonial technologies.

Science at the Ugandan Parliament

This project explores evidence regimes in parliamentary deliberations in Uganda and asks how new epistemic orders emerge to influence political decision-making.

Recent publications

Catastrophic Art. Moradi, Fazil (2022)

In Public Culture
Thematic Cluster: Justifying Gender. Lamoureaux, Siri, Richard Rottenburg, Sara de Wit, Alena Thiel, Ernst Van der Wal, and Austin Bryan (2021)

In Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society
Becoming Without: Making Transgenic Mosquitoes and Disease Control in Brazil. Reis-Castro, Luísa (2021)

In Environmental Humanities

Blog

Obituary for Dr. Sylvanus Nicholas Spencer 04 Nov 2021 Andrea Behrends

It is with great sadness that we announce the untimely death of our dear colleague and member of the LOST research group, Dr. Sylvanus Nicholas Spencer. After his doctorate in 2012, he has been a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of History and African Studies at the...

Victimisation is colonial thinking as well 04 Nov 2021 Uli Beisel

Regarding: DLF Wissenschaft im Brennpunkt, 27.12.2020: "Colonial thinking in science: ethical dumping"

 

Authors (in alphabetical order)

Dr. Kwaku Poku Asante, Director Kintampo Health Research Centre und Co-­PI Phase II and III RTS,S malaria vaccine trials,...

Upcoming events

  • 28 Sep 2022

    6th Vienna Ethnography Lab: Relating Risks

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Partnerships

CONTACT & NETWORK COORDINATOR

info@lost-research-group.org

Richard Rottenburg

Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research (WISER)
University of the Witwatersrand
Private Bag 3
PO Box Wits
2050 South Africa

ABOUT THE LOST RESEARCH NETWORK

The acronym LOST stands for Law, Organization, Science and Technology. Anthropology of Law (L), Organization Studies (O), and Science and Technology Studies (ST) are three vigorous transdisciplinary fields. A growing academic current mingles these fields and thereby engenders provocative insights. Working at the intersection of these fields and fusing their approaches, we additionally emphasize the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of fact-making in the contemporary. 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 with a special focus on critique. We address issues of global and planetary scope, although several of our empirical projects are situated in Africa. Since its inception in 2002 by Richard Rottenburg, LOST has expanded – from a small group localized in Halle to a decentralized network of independent scholars.

https://lost-research-group.org/
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