Producing scientific knowledge in Africa today: auto-ethnographic insights from a climate change researcher

This chapter analyses a life-history interview with an African climate change researcher, Mbow, to explore the conditions for scientific knowledge production in Africa. Mbow’s history points to three important and intertwined issues that played out differently through the different phases of his life: an inherited or colonial curriculum; universality of knowledge, namely the transfer of methods and theories from the Global North; and the cultural production of African researchers. The chapter shows how the post-colonial school system in Senegal was modelled over the French system and thus how difficult it was for Mbow to become independent of the colonial heritage. Through a capacity building programme, Mbow gained the competences necessary to question the transfer of theories and methods from the Global North and become an African emancipated researcher producing knowledge of relevance for Africa. The discussion draws on these analyses in order to discuss issues related to producing climate change research in Africa today. The chapter is concluded by arguing that it is necessary to take local experience-based knowledge into account in climate change research; therefore, researchers need to problematize climatic knowledge, particularise climatic experience, and pluralise climatic meaning by integrating local experience-based knowledge.

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