The recruitment and hiring of a postdoc and three PhD students, the latter of whom are all from West Africa, has brought together an interdisciplinary team trained in the fields of history, medical anthropology, medicine, conservation biology, and molecular biology. The professional expertise, language skills, and research experience of team members has enabled us to adopt a more bioregional approach to the project that extends research beyond Liberia into Guinea and Nigeria and offers a more ambitious, comparative investigation into the past and present convergence of infectious disease research, biodiversity conservation, and resource extraction in the Guinean Forests of West Africa over the last one-hundred years.
Collectively, we have conducted more than 300 formal and informal interviews with conservation biologists, veterinary scientists, health professionals, animal caretakers, retired workers, mining staff, and elders in Liberia, Guinea, Nigeria, Europe, and the United States. We have also undertaken more than 36 months of fieldwork in Liberia, Guinea, and Nigeria. In-depth research in archival collections on three continents has also made visible the close historical ties between infrastructures of resource extraction and virus hunting, wildlife sampling, and disease surveillance in the making of the Guinean Forests of West Africa into a hotspot of biodiversity and emerging infectious disease threats.
A workshop held in April 2024 on “Extraction and Its Ecologies” brought together an interdisciplinary group of 29 international scholars from the humanities and social sciences working on issues of biodiversity, health, zoonotic diseases, and/or toxic pollution in zones of extraction in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. A series of articles on mining and conservation in West Africa with scholars from NYU for "Africa is a Country", as well as a field course in Kenya on the ethnographic traces of modernity and its afterlives with the University of Oslo, have emerged out of this gathering.
Our work on virus research and the primate trade in West Africa has also resulted in a collaboration and forthcoming joint publication in the journal "Isis" on post/colonial ecologies of extraction, conservation, and care of primates in the history of biomedical infrastructures.
To date, we have delivered 29 presentations at universities, government agencies, and professional meetings, and have 5 publications in print, 2 in press, and one book under contract.
