Measuring fatigue: The politics of innovation and standardization in a South African lab

Abstract

Recent studies of postcolonial science and technology have emphasized relationships – competitive, collaborative or otherwise – between scientists and other kinds of knowledge producers or stakeholders. This article explores the transnational connections and debates of scientists who are themselves positioned differently in the world. Combining methods from intellectual history and multi-sited ethnography, the article documents the case of a team of exercise physiologists working in South Africa. The South Africans must balance, on the one hand, standardizing laboratory practice to produce credible scientific claims with, on the other hand, innovating new techniques to deal with the everyday circumstances of experiment. Although a tension between standardization and innovation is to be expected in laboratory practice, the ‘technical tightrope’ scientists from the global South must walk is both more fragile and more politicized than in the North. Interestingly, these acts of standardization and innovation are designed to intervene in a century-old debate over the causes of human fatigue: whether or not fatigue begins in ‘the center’, the mind, or ‘the periphery’, the muscles. In exercise physiology, then, a ‘center-periphery dynamic’ emerges in two entangled registers: one in terms of the geopolitical landscape of science and the other in terms of models of human physiology.