
Dr Diran Soumonni
African Fellow, September 2023 - February 2024
Home Institution: University of the Witwatersrand
I teach innovation studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, where my research interests primarily encompass comparative science, technology and innovation systems, energy innovation, and innovation for sustainability. In addition, I’m interested in the plural epistemological paradigms that underpin various innovation domains with a view to clarifying some of the conditions under which more equitable and just societal outcomes might be attained. Inspired by the work of Global South and Global African thinkers on sustainable industrialisation, my current research advances a more holistic and historically-grounded perspective on ‘endogenous innovation’. My professional and community outreach activities have been mediated through a sustained engagement with networks such as the Global Network for the Economics of Learning, Innovation and Competence Buildings Systems (GLOBELICS), its regional African hub, AFRICALICS, the International Network on Appropriate Technology (INAT), and most recently, as a co-editor of the newly established multi-disciplinary journal, Black Histories: Dialogues.
Project title: Endogenous Innovation and Transversal Epistemic Communities: Revisiting Knowledge Fluxes between Scotland and Africa
My IASH project is informed by the observation that before the scientific understanding of the COVID-19 virus was sufficient to develop reliable therapeutics and vaccines, unusually pointed polemics about the validity of knowledge claims spilled out into the public domain as had been seldom seen before. In that climate, old contestations were also revived about the relationship between plant-based and synthetic medicines on the one hand, and between ‘folk’ medicine and scientific medicine, on the other.
This study seeks to problematise such binary oppositions (both within and across societies) from the vantage point of epistemic pluralism, which is increasingly gaining credence among philosophers of science. More specifically, I explore these questions in the context of multi-directional knowledge exchanges among medical students, professionals and other related knowledge holders who travelled between Scotland and West and Southern Africa in the second half of the 19th century. A preliminary scrutiny of a few associated texts (e.g. theses, journal publications and personal communications) suggests that a variety of sources, techniques, attitudes, ‘grammars of science’ and indeed, contestations, have contributed to the body of contemporary medical know-how in underappreciated ways.
Motivated by the scholarship of the late Burkinabé historian, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, on ‘endogenous development’, and that of the science, technology and society scholar, Geri Augusto, on ‘transepistemic interaction’, I use an expanded notion of ‘endogenous innovation’ as a lens to help rethink and restore the fragmented intellectual heritage of Africans across space and time. The modern-day relevance of this research project for inclusive pharmaceutical innovation (and beyond) will be reinforced through a close collaboration with an expert on innovation in the life sciences at The University of Edinburgh.