The Multilateral Initiative on Malaria - malariaforskningens cirkulatoriska system

Sammanfattning: Leaning on the poststructuralist perspective Actor Network Theory (ANT) the French philosopher Bruno Latour describes – in his model “The Circulatory System of Scientific Facts” – how scientific facts are part of a societal system and thus depend (for their status as legitimate representations of the world) on the other inhabitants of that system, i.e. on instruments, academia, alliances outside of academia and the public. By following the effects of events within the international malaria research alliance “The Multilateral Initiative on Malaria” this thesis shows how ANT productively can be used to identify relevant actors and to follow these in many of the negotiations they are engaged in when trying to translate various interests. But the thesis also uncovers some of the shortcomings of ANT and the Latourian model. The narrow focus on the fact stabilising process in certain societies appears to have made Latour blind to the variety of societal conditions that science work faces in different parts of the world. Additionally, Latour and ANT fails to capture that the authority of some principles or some actors can make the system exclude references to actors assumed present in the system and that – specifically – malaria research therefore is as much about what is absent (excluded), as about what is present in the system. This thesis therefore argues that Latour and ANT (focusing on observable effects of fact stabilizing activities), fails to acknowledge important aspects of the interdependence of the societies surrounding the fact making activities of malaria research. A study that wants to analyse malaria research on a profound level therefore needs to be complemented by other perspectives such as: Postcolonial Technoscience Studies, Development Studies and Science Policy Studies.